I'd rather see Self-Help design and build affordable housing over the Durham Housing Authority any day of the week. They seem to 'get' downtown in a way that DHA does not.

And I'm biased. A good friend lives in a DHA property downtown and the stupidity of their bureaucracy and favoritism he describes on a weekly basis is maddening.

Durham seems obsessed with locking out for-profit builders from affordable housing markets. Perhaps advocates and civic leaders could explain why?

In limiting supply of bidders, doesn't that raise prices, making project less affordable, and in the end delivering less affordability to the city?

Who says 501 c3s like Self-Help or Builders of Hope are inherently better equipped to build housing more affordably than Skanska or Wexford, or a local outfit like Cherokee, TND, LeChase or Resolute?

Doesn't a collusion where a non-profit gets a $2m property for free, at no-bid, encourage the politically-connected back scratching rampant in affordable housing markets?

To Tom's point, why don't we put these properties out for RFP, with no restrictions on business type?

Why doesn't city council just state what they want, say 50 units at 60% AMI in perpetuity, then put it out for RFP?

Lisa says: "To the city’s credit, Council just approved $100,000 to hire the consultants Enterprise Community Partners to help Durham sort out its priorities and establish a plan." I certainly hope they can come up with a plan that is better than the answers their vice-president, Karen Lado, gave to Lisa in an interview published in the Indy earlier this month. Lisa asked: "What are the forces behind the affordability gap?" Here is Karen Lado's answer in it's entirety: "A city's growth and people's changing lifestyle preferences. People are waiting longer to have families, so there are fewer households with children. People are choosing to live a more urban lifestyle. There is a lot of interest in downtown and central neighborhoods."

Does that make sense to anyone? Fewer households should lead to lower aggregate demand and, therefore, lower prices and rents and greater affordability, not the opposite. And so what if there's a lot of "interest in downtown"? That just means that downtown may become more expensive relative to other neighborhoods, but it doesn't necessarily mean that overall affordability will decline.

Let's try a different news source. The Wall Street Journal, as it happens, ran a news story Monday entitled, "Midtier Rents Outpace Rise for Luxury Units." Luxury apartments are called Class A in real estate lingo and their rents rose 4.2% in 2015 according to Axiometrics, Inc., an apartment research firm. Class B rents rose 5.8% while Class C rents rose 4.9%. What's going on? Nationwide, there's "a severe shortage of midtier apartments [Class B]," said the Journal, "causing rents for these units to rise at a faster pace than for luxury ones." Why don't developers build more? "Construction costs are generally too high to justify building new complexes for low-and middle-income tenants. . .The difference in costs between installing granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances is so slight compared to buying land and installing elevators that economists say developing a luxury apartment and a midtier one comes out roughly the same."

So now you know why practically everything being built in downtown is expensive. And it's happening all over the country. According to the Journal, 80% of the apartments built nationwide last year were Class A. It would be well for the City to ask the question: what can we do to lower building costs?

I happen to know something about the kinds of fees that City charges. In 2008, I moved the Tate house from Markham Ave. to Edith St. in order to preserve that 100-year old house from the wrecking ball of Jeff Monsein. (He wanted to build a much more expensive rental house on the Markham St. site--which he did.) The lot on Edith St. had never had a house before and that gave the City a chance to charge me me "impact" fees and water and sewer connection fees. I paid $1165.56 in "impact fees," which including $817 in street fees even though that part of Edith St. was unpaved then and unpaved now. (I'd say the street had more "impact" on my car's shock absorbers than my car had an "impact" on the street, but never mind.) The water and sewer connection charges were $6114.87. Now the City did have to do a little work. But my plumber ran my water and sewer lines to the street, and the City's water and sewer lines were already in the street. So connecting the two was neither expensive nor time-consuming for the City. But the total of these two fees were $7280.43. And, of course, there were other permit fees, inspection fees, etc.

Now do a little thought experiment. If you're a builder or a developer and you're confronted with fees like that before you turn over a shovelful of dirt, what kind of building are you going to build? A hundred-thousand dollar "affordable house?" Not bloody likely.

Governments love fees like this because most people don't even realize that they're paying them in the price of their house or the rent on their apartment. Then to remedy the problem they've helped to create, they build "affordable" projects like Rolling Hills that Kevin cites as "only" costing $210,000 a unit not counting land or demolition costs. I've been told, by someone who should know, that Eastway Village, another affordable housing project, probably cost the City about $300,000 a unit. (At those prices, why not just buy poor people townhouses in Treyburn and be done with it?) And, of course, to finance these projects, the City has to raise taxes, such as the inaptly named "penny for housing." And who do you suppose pays the property taxes on rental property. Sure the landlord signs the check to the tax office, but who really pays? Oh, and who's going to pay the $100,000 that goes to Enterprise Community Partners to write a report spouting platitudes? Right.

@John - you left a lot there worthy of commenting on.

RE: "Fewer households should lead to lower aggregate demand and, therefore, lower prices and rents and greater affordability, not the opposite." -

I suspect you misunderstood this. I took it to mean there are fewer household formations, in the traditional sense (married/kids, etc.), meaning more people are living alone. This trend creates more demand for housing, specifically housing designed for single occupancy. (check out the book Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg). Single person occupancy is the fastest growing segment of the market.

I challenge the premise that single people inherently want to live in multifamily (which seems implied by our current building patterns). Durham’s real problem is a severe shortage of detached homes. Most single people (like coupled people) overwhelmingly prefer this form. I know many single people who bought 1000sf single family detached homes in the urban core. Affordable houses still exist in Durham, I found more than 700 on Trulia, but fewer in the core. Your class B strata fits this starter home mold, in my view.

The affordable housing 'crisis', articulated weekly by someone these days, is as much a middle class issues as a working class (not once have I heard this mentioned in local media). Even on the upper end, you could note that Trinity Park has long suffered a housing shortage (Durham should totally build more historic houses! :>), creating annual appreciate rates of between 8-10%. So we could say affordable housing issues exist across income bands, and across household types. But I suspect urban price acceleration is greater in the middle & upper bands.

The only real solution is supplying more detached housing to the urban core. It needs to be done at scale. There is such a long list of policy and organizational resistance to this solution, I wouldn’t hold any breaths.

@AL, John--

I would agree that the best solution to affordable housing is creating jobs that pay wages that can afford housing. That is a middle class diminution problem, and it's very, very hard to solve at a muni level. The efforts at a state level to attract skilled industry like auto manufacturing are somewhat attractive, though given the corporate tax handouts used to win these plants, it's hard to see them as "private sector" actions, really.

But we can influence housing creation, to a certain extent. And I see no reason why we shouldn't.

Fundamentally, I do think there are legitimate reasons to worry about prices rising too fast in the central portion of Durham. As a community, we do seem to value diversity of all kinds -- race, age, belief, and I would add income to that. There have to be opportunities to maintain affordable housing stock, or we'll end up with a city that doesn't look like the Durham any of us chose to move to.

John, I love ya and respect ya, and I've also had my share of aggravations with T.P.T.B. -- from having to rearchitect the stairs to a second-floor accessory dwelling unit after the unit envelope was complete and the building bricked in, to a very frustrating run-around when getting my leaky water line replaced. But that's not unique to Durham. I've lived in a posh, very upscale suburb of Orlando and a more liberal, crunchy city outside Boston, and dealt with the same headaches. I think developers everywhere deal with them. Yes, the imposition of REAL, substantial impact fees -- a la those in places like California -- distort housing markets. So do zoning restrictions. We aren't dealing with those here.

In fact, we've got with the UDO and design districts a fairly wide-open path to developers, developing. It clearly wasn't too expensive for developers to profitably add thousands of apartment units. Yet the density bonuses under the old affordable housing incentives weren't working. What's wrong with the public sector fixing those and taking other steps to incentivize more affordable units? And ultimately, I'm sure there is a process by which those fees can be mitigated for affordable housing .

I think there's a path forward that celebrates and supports Durham's growth while trying to make sure that we don't wholesale lose the spirit and residents in and around downtown that have been here before, during and after revitalization.

AL, I agree on needing more housing units and supply. I don't agree that they "have" to be detached. I think we will end up with a mix of detached and MDUs. Clearly, there's a lot of MDU energy right now. I'm not too worried about our area losing its largely suburban flair -- indeed, I would argue the market is providing denser housing both as a cost-reflection as land prices rise, but more importantly to reflect the demand patterns of people who want to move and live near downtown.

Where can I find out more about DHA's plans for the East Club Boulevard community? As a resident of an adjacent neighborhood, I'm very interested in what they've got in mind.