Last weekend, Reverend Bankole Akinbinu of Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh led 300 congregants in a prayer for affordable housing.
“We pray now, God, for the most vulnerable amongst us that are represented in this county and some even in this place,” Akinbinu intoned slowly and deliberately. “We pray that the actions and the decisions that we make, God, will align with your purposes and your will, so that everyone in this county, God, can thrive and not simply survive.”
It was Saturday afternoon, not Sunday morning. Most of the people in attendance didn’t even belong to Baptist Grove. Akinbinu wasn’t leading a church service, but a community meeting on the subject of Wake County’s severe, persistent housing crisis. A recent report found that by 2029, Wake County will have a shortage of over 110,000 housing units. Affordable housing for the county’s low-income residents is especially hard to come by.
Akinbinu’s prayer wasn’t solely for the benefit of the rank-and-file Wake County residents assembled before him. He was also addressing some decision-makers in the room: namely, the eight members of the Raleigh City Council.
“Give us imaginative thinking,” he prayed. “We know that there are barriers, God, but we believe that as we think imaginatively, as we think faithfully, that we will be able, God, to move forward despite any obstacles.”
ONE Wake, a nonpartisan coalition of 47 religious congregations from around the county, called the meeting in hopes of securing a handful of public commitments from the city council. All of the council members, including Mayor Janet Cowell, showed up to take their turn in the hot seat.
ONE Wake’s demands were as follows: Provide a list of available city-owned properties and land; meet with ONE Wake leaders and discuss building affordable housing on said land; reserve 100 acres of the publicly-owned Randleigh Tract in Southeast Raleigh for affordable housing; meet with ONE Wake and and Saint Augustine’s University alumni to discuss the embattled HBCU’s future; and put a $150 million affordable housing bond on the ballot this November.
Every council member agreed to provide the requested data and participate in the meetings. A majority of them were on board with the Randleigh affordable housing proposition (though Cowell and two council members said they couldn’t commit to it). When it came to the $150 million bond request, though, the answer was a resounding “no.”
The city council is already planning to put a $101.5 million housing bond and a $101.5 million transportation bond on Raleigh voters’ ballots this fall. Staff say the combined $203 million bond package would not require a tax increase. But increasing the housing bond to $150 million, as ONE Wake wants, would require either a tax increase or a reduction of the transportation bond.
“There are some critical transportation projects that are needed to connect folks from housing to jobs and to essential services,” council member Jonathan Lambert-Melton explained during the meeting. “We know that folks are also [cost] burdened in transportation. Housing and transportation are the two highest costs of living.”
Per the city’s current plan, the housing bond funds would go towards housing development and preservation, homebuyer assistance and preservation, homelessness response, and mixed-income development. The transportation funds would go to constructing Bus Rapid Transit lanes, bike facilities, sidewalks, and other road improvement projects.
“Currently, 57% of our city streets do not have sidewalks,” said council member Jane Harrison. The city council recently approved an affordable housing development near two bus routes, she told the assembled crowd, but there are currently no sidewalks connecting the site to the nearest bus stops.
“I want to ensure that when we’re building affordable housing, that people can also get to wherever they want to go,” Harrison said. “If we do not invest in this transportation piece, then we are doing a disservice to our residents.”
Cowell cautioned attendees that there will also be a $680 million public schools bond on Wake voters’ ballots in November. Raleigh is probably going to have to raise taxes for reasons unrelated to the bond referenda, she said, and is trying to be careful not to over-burden residents. A bigger bond package that requires a bigger tax increase could lead them to reject the referenda.
“The last thing that we want … is for [the city bonds] to fail,” Cowell said.
The mayor also pointed out a silver lining that could assuage ONE Wake members’ disappointment: $101.5 million in affordable housing funding from the city translates to several times that amount in results when you pair it with investments from developers and nonprofits.
“Affordable housing is innately a collaborative effort,” she said, unlike transportation or parks funding which typically comes exclusively from the city.
Even though the ONE Wake and city leaders in the room weren’t in perfect lockstep on their bond priorities, they seemed to understand each other’s positions.
“We have no permanent allies. We have no permanent enemies. We only have permanent interests,” said Reverend Wesley Spears-Newsome, a co-chair of ONE Wake’s strategy team and an associate pastor at Greenwood Forest Baptist Church in Cary, as the meeting came to a close. “We’ve all got a long way to go together. We are in community together, and even when we disagree—maybe especially when we disagree—that community is vital, and we will continue to move forward consistently and persistently, using our power, the power of the people of Wake County, to make us a place where it’s not just possible to survive, but to thrive.”
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