In the Upcoming Mayoral and City Council Elections, Raleigh Voters Will Choose to Change or Stay the Course

Hundreds of people flowed into a Baptist church in Southwest Raleigh on Thursday, not to hear a sermon but to demand affordable housing from the next Raleigh City Council. 

Elderly white homeowners sat alongside young Black renters in a gathering of community members that has become a powerful lobbying force in Raleigh and Wake County elections. Packed shoulder to shoulder in church pews, residents of all ages, races, and religions quizzed city council candidates on their commitment to helping low- and middle-income residents stay in their homes.

The candidate forum—hosted by ONE Wake, a grassroots campaign for affordable housing—is representative of the larger anxieties of Raleigh residents. Questions about how residents will afford increasing rents and property taxes have dominated the narrative in the last several elections, and housing is once again the top priority for many voters as the next city council election approaches. 

With a new mayor set to take the reins, however, this year’s election could lead to a shift in Raleigh policy. Of the five mayoral candidates, two have emerged as apparent front-runners: Janet Cowell, former state treasurer and former CEO and president of the nonprofit Dix Park Conservancy, and Terrance Ruth, an NC State University professor who’s running for mayor once again this year. Additionally, several other districts—including Districts A, C, and E—and the at-large seats feature competitive races between incumbents and candidates offering change. 

As a mayoral candidate, Ruth gained momentum in the 2022 race with promises of increased transparency and community engagement. He netted 40.6 percent of the vote, placing just six percentage points behind Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin’s winning finish. In his campaign this year, Ruth is prioritizing community-led development. Cowell is slightly more moderate on growth, campaigning on practical housing solutions.

A safe choice?

Cowell may seem like a safe, establishment choice, but she says she’s determined to move Raleigh forward. Cowell is passionate about preserving green spaces, as you might expect from her former role at the Dix Park Conservancy. When she served on the city council in the early 2000s, she helped establish a stormwater policy that prevented building in watersheds and protected residents from flooding. Now, her environmental consciousness may be especially appealing to voters in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

“‘Stormwater’ is not a sexy word, but it’s essentially ‘How do you protect against flooding? How do you have a resilient city?,’” Cowell says. “That intersects with trees, green infrastructure. How do you use native plants and natural floodways as opposed to concrete structures?”

Cowell’s goals include preserving and expanding Raleigh’s tree canopy, incentivizing green development, and enhancing creeks and natural waterways to reduce flash flooding. Where waterway restoration is expensive, Cowell says enhancing waterways—also known as daylighting—reintroduces elements of a natural creek system as well as native plants that help absorb and slow flowing water. 

She notes that most of Raleigh’s creeks are preserved through the city’s greenway system and that the city is already investing in daylighting creeks such as Pigeon Branch Creek, sections of Crabtree Creek, and Rocky Branch Creek, for which the city just received state funds to continue daylighting work. 

“You’re creating an amenity for the public, where you’ve got a creek that’s much more accessible for people who actually interact with water and enjoy nature,” Cowell says. “But you’ve also got a much more effective facility.”

When it comes to housing, Cowell generally supports the current city council’s policies, saying “diversification and deregulation around zoning is overall positive.” She adds, however, that she’d like to have a more open conversation about potential changes to housing policies like “missing middle,” now that the city is seeing the policy in action and has a better idea of its effects. 

As a former city council member and longtime politician, Cowell is pragmatic when it comes to housing. While many are calling for housing reserved exclusively for low-income residents, Cowell says she “remembers those massive public housing complexes of deep affordability that were viewed to be not a best practice”—otherwise known as housing projects. 

Mixed-use and mixed-income development, like the kind planned for the old DMV headquarters, is the best way forward, Cowell argues. Affordable housing requires a significant subsidy, so without millions of dollars in the bank, paying for it requires profitable market-rate housing. 

“That’s where reality hits the road, where people are thinking, ‘Oh, we’re just going to build X number of affordable units, and somehow we’re going to pay for that,’” Cowell says. “It’s going to be a more urban model of affordable units, and it’s going to be mixed income. And you’re going to have to use the market to pay for it, which means you’re going to have to have a fairly aggressive growth and development model.”

Cowell’s vision for the future includes more than existing city council strategies, though. One new policy she wants to explore is tax increment financing, which would use property tax increases imposed on gentrifying communities to protect and reinvest in those same communities, she says. She’s also committed to working with ONE Wake.

“Let’s think about the trust that churches have with people,” Cowell says. “Because if I’m sitting here as a home builder and I go to somebody, they’re not going to trust. So many of these communities have been targeted … cheated, lied to. Having the trust that comes with the church community to work with finance builders on programs could be one of the most fruitful and productive partnerships.”

An aspirational choice?

Where Cowell is pragmatic, Terrance Ruth is aspirational. Ruth’s campaign represents a significant group of Raleighites who want change, particularly when it comes to the way the city does (or doesn’t) engage with its residents.

For years, the city council has been dogged with accusations of ignoring resident feedback and making less-than-transparent decisions. In 2020, the city council disbanded community advisory councils (CACs) in a surprise vote. In 2021, it made significant changes to local elections behind closed doors. And throughout the years, some residents have felt blindsided by major development projects.

Ruth supports the city’s Office of Community Engagement and its manager, Tiesha Mosley, whom he calls “dynamic.” But his plan for community engagement goes far beyond the modest steps the city council has taken in the last few years.

If elected, Ruth says he will organize weekly town hall meetings in each district. He also wants to touch base with residents weekly or biweekly, so people can ask questions or make comments without waiting for a city council meeting. 

“This is not new, it’s just valuing talking with residents, so they don’t feel the mayor is distant from them,” Ruth says. “I don’t only want to hear concerns, I want to hear the dreams and hopes of residents. I want them to feel like they’re a part of this journey.” 

Ruth plans to reorganize the city’s commissions and committees to reduce member turnover, make the selection process more transparent, and make it easier for people without privilege to participate. Currently, these committees don’t value “the voice of lived experience,” he says. 

For Ruth, community engagement is the cornerstone of good public policy. Missing- middle housing and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) are generally good initiatives, he says, but the lack of communication has caused indirect harm to communities. 

“Policy often starts with good intentions. Implementation is often where it goes wrong, or right,” Ruth says. “The way forward is by maximizing the feedback we get from residents, period. 

“We have these tools, but we’re not using them.”

Ruth is a critic of the city council’s current housing initiatives. He says despite the $80 million housing bond and implementation of missing middle, progress on affordable housing has been “meager.” The city should be more aggressive when it comes to land banking, he says, as well as “enacting [zoning] protections around areas we know will be hit hard in the future.”

Ruth cites the New Bern Avenue BRT line as an example. It has already gentrified parts of Southeast Raleigh and displaced some longtime residents, he says. When it comes to public transportation, the city needs to protect the people who are using that transportation, Ruth says. With the highest bus ridership in Southeast Raleigh, preservation of existing affordable housing in those neighborhoods is paramount. 

Ruth also speaks passionately about building ladders for people to move from renting to home ownership, as well as closing the racial wealth gap. The City of Raleigh is in a powerful position to create generational wealth by contracting Black-owned businesses, he says. 

“We need to make sure that people can actually be prepared to take on some of these dollars that are flowing through the city,” Ruth says. “We attract six-figure people, but we don’t grow six-figure people. So you’re literally born and [you] die in your rental …. I want to recenter the human being that’s in the home, so that we don’t just stop at you being in an affordable home but [help] you actually move from rental to [home] ownership.”

A vote for change or stay the course?

With a new mayorship on the horizon, there’s a lot of energy surrounding the Raleigh City Council election this year. The contests for the at-large and District C seats are particularly crowded, even as three incumbents—Jonathan Lambert-Melton, Stormie Forte, and Corey Branch—run for reelection.

In the at-large race, Reeves Peeler, an activist and member of the Raleigh Planning Commission, is a vocal advocate for unions, labor rights, and equitable development. If elected, he wants to create better relationships with city unions, including the Firefighters Association. The city fire department is severely understaffed, and firefighters are struggling to cover the cost of living after retirement, he says. Implementing a living wage for all city staffers is another big priority. 

“I want to see us be a city that plans and develops for working-class people,” Peeler says. “I have not seen that be part of our vision, at least in the last five years …. We have a huge, huge working-class, middle-class population that cannot live here. A lot of our planning and housing initiatives really focus only on a market-filtering concept and not really at all on integrating neighborhoods across income levels, across class.”

If the 2022 election is any indication, Peeler and other newcomers have a solid chance of winning votes from residents who are frustrated by what they see as a lack of progress. On the other hand, incumbents say consistency in leadership is important. 

If reelected, Melton would focus on ushering the big policy initiatives of the last few years “across the finish line,” he says. The council member supports the city’s missing-middle policy, BRT, and alternative response program, which he says are finally starting to take shape. 

“A lot of the work we’ve done on zoning reform, to make it easier to build different types of housing affordable to folks at different stages in life—we’re just starting to see the benefits of those policy changes,” Melton says. “And, likewise, I’m starting to see some areas where I think we can tweak it a little. So I want to stay around at least one more term to help these big initiatives through.”

As a new leader takes the reins—and new city council members are, potentially, elected—Melton says he expects the biggest shift to come in the feel of city council meetings. 

“The biggest change is just going to be personality,” he says. “The mayor sets the tone, runs the meetings, is the face of the city, coordinates closest with staff, and that tone will change. And sometimes how you do something is just as important as what you’re doing. Regardless of who gets elected, there will be a different person managing the how.”

This is the final story in a four-part series on the Raleigh City Council leading up to the municipal election this fall. Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

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