Market forces out workers

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CHARLOTTE – Julie Porter has spoken to teachers and nurses’ aides who live as far away as Gastonia and Stanly and commute to south Charlotte daily.

Porter, the president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, said they can’t afford housing near where they work. And they’re not the only ones.

“UNC-Charlotte did a study in 2012 that said (in Charlotte) we’re about 15,000 units short in workforce housing,” Porter said. “It’s a huge shortage.”

To dent that deficiency, the Housing Partnership, a private, nonprofit affordable-housing developer, has increased its efforts to develop workforce housing in the city – efforts that are often met with fiery opposition from neighbors of the proposed housing developments.

The most recent Housing Partnership project is proposed for south Charlotte, just outside of Matthews town limits, and residents from surrounding subdivisions have taken up arms against it.

At a City Council rezoning hearing last week, those residents packed the meeting chamber – and dozens more were left out in the lobby – wearing red shirts and carrying protest signs, both making their message clear: NIMBY. Not in my backyard.

City Council members will be taking that into consideration Jan. 21 when they vote on the rezoning that would allow the 70-unit workforce housing project along Weddington Road.

“I have a big file full of emails and people listing different reasons why they don’t want it,” said District 7 Councilman Ed Driggs, who was elected in November to represent the district in which the project would be built. “All of us on council realize it’s going to be a big decision.”

In addition to the T-shirts and picket signs, protesters have created a Facebook page and a website in opposition to the rezoning. The Facebook page, titled “Weddington Rd Rezone Committee,” has 620 likes and a slogan: “Say no to the rezone.”

While the negative response to the Weddington Road rezoning request has been strong, Porter said it’s quite common for neighbors to oppose workforce housing projects in their part of town.

“In south Charlotte and in the suburbs, it’s fairly typical to find this opposition,” she said. “Any time you put multifamily next to residential there’s going to be energy around and there’s going to be a lot of fear, fears about property values. National studies have shown that those fears don’t come to reality.”

Porter said she thinks a lot of those fears come from a misconception about what workforce housing actually is. It’s not the same as public housing or Section 8 housing, she said.

The generally accepted definition of workforce housing is housing for professionals who make at least 30 percent and up to 100 percent of the area median income and who, otherwise, likely wouldn’t be able to live in the neighborhoods in which they work.

Kim Graham, director of community affairs with the Housing Partnership, said workforce housing and public housing have very few similarities. The Housing Partnership has an application process which requires potential tenants to go through a background check and a credit check and prove employment, she said. The only caveat is that incomes cannot surpass $35,000, or 60 percent of the area median income. Other than that, the apartments are treated as market-rate housing. If a tenant toes the line and pays rent, they stay. If they can’t make rent, they go.

By contrast, the median income in the 28270 ZIP code, where the project would go, is $89,503, and the median income in Mecklenburg County is $55,961, according to the American Community Survey done by the Census Bureau.

Driggs said that when the rezoning was first proposed a few months ago, residents may have had a misconception about the housing type, but he said the city has been working diligently to provide the opposition with proper information. The main issues neighbors have with the proposal are traffic and site concerns, he said.

Residents are concerned the housing development, which will sit on 7.23 acres on Weddington Road, between Simfield Church Road and Portstewart Lane, will clog an already congested road. Michael Kelley, the de facto leader of the rezoning opposition, spoke at last week’s rezoning meeting about the traffic troubles on Weddington Road. Kelley didn’t return multiple calls for comment on this story.

According to the city planning staff’s analysis of the proposal, traffic would increase on Weddington Road by about 550 car trips per day. But the land in question is already zoned for a childcare center that would be expected to generate 1,900 car trips a day, according to the analysis.

The second argument from the opposition is that workforce housing doesn’t make sense on that site because nearby public transportation is virtually nonexistent.

Graham said this also may come back to a misconception about workforce housing. If the project were for subsidized housing, which is set aside for those with very low incomes, the lack of public transportation would be a problem. But those who live in workforce housing in Charlotte overwhelmingly have their own transportation, making public transit less of a factor, she said.

So far, Graham’s and Porter’s answer don’t appear to have swayed the proposal’s neighbors.

The council will take neighbors’ concerns into consideration when deciding on the rezoning. Last year, a rezoning petition to bring a Walgreens to Dilworth was rejected mostly due to outcry from neighbors. Five of the 12 council members are new, having been sworn in this month.

“The outcry is louder than normal; this is a substantial protest,” Driggs said. “To me the difficulty of the decision is going to weigh the level of opposition against the viability of this (housing) project.”

Porter said she hopes City Council takes into consideration the great need for more workforce housing in the city.

“If you keep voting it down, you’re never going to get there,” she said. “There’s a lot of consideration given to this and we feel it is a very good site.”