It’s Thursday, April 25.
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Good morning, readers.
When the Raleigh City Council adopted a missing middle housing policy in 2021, it opened the doors to different housing types permitted in neighborhoods across the city.
Now, in Southeast Raleigh’s historic Idlewild neighborhood, an innovative new development has the goal of providing homeownership opportunities to residents and families where they didn’t exist before.
The nonprofit Raleigh Area Land Trust (RALT) has raised $8.3 million to help finance the Cottages at Idlewild, a passion project from acclaimed NC Central University men’s basketball coach LeVelle Moton who grew up in the neighborhood that was one of the first in the city to permit former slaves to own homes.
The innovative cottage court model is a first for Raleigh. The city, along with several other partners, is one of the project’s key investors.
At a city council meeting in February, Moton spoke emotionally about what the project means to him.
“My grandmother lived on Lane Street. My great-grandmother lived on Idlewild,” Moton said. “That was three generations of intergenerational poverty. And 40 years of that housing project existed. Needless to say, homeownership is super important.”
The Cottages at Idlewild will include affordable homes for sale and rent for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the area median income. And while buyers will own the homes, RALT will own the land underneath them, allowing the homes to remain affordable in perpetuity by making them less susceptible to market forces and gentrification.
“We’re not just building houses; we’re building futures by lowering the barrier of entry to homeownership through affordable purchase prices,” says Kevin Campbell, RALT’s executive director.
Moton thinks of the project as “not only a moral obligation” but “a social responsibility” for the community that gave him his start.
“We have an opportunity to eradicate generational poverty,” he said.
Have a good Thursday.
—Jane
Durham
More than 3,000 gallons of sewage spilled into a Durham creek.
Wake
Many of the inhabitants of a homeless encampment located on a state-owned lot located off of U.S. 70 in Raleigh left before a Tuesday morning deadline.
Orange
Orange County Schools Board of Education member Jennifer Moore released a statement about her resignation this week.
North Carolina
Gov. Roy Cooper released his budget priorities ahead of the opening of the legislative short session this week.
Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 74 degrees.
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