Strategic Housing Plan Research Trip
For the Strategic Housing Committee's August 19th meeting, volunteer committee members along with elected officials, City staff, and other local and regional housing champions traveled to Durham and Chapel Hill for a full day of knowledge building and networking around affordable housing.
Watch an overview video of the trip
The group left Hendersonville at 6:15 AM and traveled by bus to Durham. The group first toured an affordable housing, mixed-use project that is a partnership between Durham County, Laurel Street (a mixed-income developer) and the UNC School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative (DFI), who are currently contracting with Hendersonville to conduct a needs assessment and identify potential sites for future affordable housing projects in Hendersonville.
The 500 East Main Street redevelopment project creatively combines ground floor retail, a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments, a childcare center, and structured parking to serve the needs of the tenants, visitors, and county employees working nearby. This Low Income Housing Tax Credit project is situated near the library, 2 park areas, and government services with great pedestrian access. The project was inspiring to tour and the Hendersonville team learned about the complexities, costs, and rewards of developing this scale of project.
The School of Government hosted the Hendersonville group for a presentation and Q&A with Community Home Trust. This non-profit organization was originally formed by local governments and delivers housing affordability by placing land in a land trust and working with first-time homeowners to own the homes built on the community’s land. The Hendersonville team peppered CHT’s Executive Director with questions as we explore this model as a potential approach in the City’s strategic housing plan.
After the lecture, the group boarded a bus and toured single-family, townhomes, and apartments where CHT has community land trust residences.
Some key takeaways from the trip:
- Density affords great walkability and much-needed affordable housing units
- When creating housing affordability, a key emphasis must be to bring stability to housing and not focus on generational wealth building
- Hendersonville is experiencing the same complex challenges as other cities in North Carolina
- We must have supply, stability and subsidy to create an effective regional housing strategy
- When funding and political will meet - great things can happen
- Effecting change in housing affordability is a shared responsibility that will take vision, patience, compromise and the involvement of the entire community
Thank you to the following community partners and Strategic Housing Plan committee members for joining Mayor Barbara Volk, Mayor Pro Tem Lyndsey Simpson, Council Member Melinda Lowrance, Council Member Jennifer Hensley and City Staff on the trip and for their commitment to expanding affordable housing!
Erica Anderson (Land of Sky), Sarah Cosgrove (Builders Association of the Blue Ridge Mountains), Nancy Diaz (Mountain True), Jennifer Duvall (Housing Assistance Corporation/Atlantic Bay Mortgage), Carsten Erkel (Partnership for Economic Development/Elkamet), Melisa Escobar (True Ridge), Susan Frady (Housing Assistance Corporation), Robert Hooper (WNC Source), Margaret Lebeck (Housing Assistance Corporation), Anna Lloyd (Land of Sky), Madeline Offen (Pisgah Legal), Steve Orr (City of Saluda), Hilary Paradise (Town and Mountain Realty), Nora Sjue (Henderson County), and Chris Todd (Henderson County)
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