On June 7th, 2022, the Carrboro Town Council adopted the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan. The plan is the town’s first ever Comprehensive Plan, and came complete with an Implementation Chapter of strategies, policies and actions to advance plan priorities.
Yesterday, on June 6th, 2024, the News and Observer ran a story titled “These NC towns have the fastest-growing home prices in the state.” A website called Stacker.com queried Zillow’s database to evaluate 1-Year Price Change and 5-Year Price Change numbers for NC municipalities, and Carrboro had the 2nd-highest percentage growth in the state in home prices.
What’s notable about the top ten towns in the list is that most of them have some type of rare natural amenity – the beach, the mountains, a lake, etc. Only three towns in the list do not have such an amenity. Two of the towns are Marvin and Weddington, some of the most expensive suburbs south of Charlotte, where the median home is more than $1 million dollars.
The other beachless, mountainless, lakeless town with soaring prices – is Carrboro.
To state this plainly: our current policy environment is so unsuited to bringing smaller, denser, lower-cost per home multifamily housing into being that we’ve created the price escalation of resort communities WITHOUT needing a beach, mountains, island or lake to raise prices as if we had one of those amenities. (with gentle apologies to University Lake; we see you, but you’re not Lake Norman)
Meanwhile, on Tuesday evening, the Town Council received a presentation on the results of the 2024 Town Community Survey, the most valuable, scientific picture of community opinion data available to the town. The free response comments paint a vivid picture. In response to
Q29. What do you think are the MOST SIGNIFICANT issues facing Carrboro today?
This is what the free responses that begin with A look like :
Page 1 of 10 for answers to this question
Page 2 of 10
Page 3 of 10
This is what the free responses that begin with H look like :
Page 6 of 10
This is what the free responses that begin with L look like :
Page 8 of 10
Finally, there is a set of maps of town opinion by Census Tract. Most of them are blue and dark blue, signifying ratings of “Very Satisfied” or “Satisfied” for the Town. Here’s the map of opinions on affordability:
Basically the only neighborhoods that reach “Neutral” on housing affordability are the wealthiest neighborhoods in town with the highest home values. And even they’re not happy.
We know this already, don’t we? What’s the point of another affordability blog post?
Most residents in town are either concerned about the cost of their living situation or know one or more people who are worried about it. But sometimes the data starkly illustrates how much change is needed.
At the two year anniversary of adopting the Carrboro Connects plan, only one substantive land use policy change (the abolishing of residential parking requirements) has been brought to the Council table. In that time the size of a standard down payment for a home in Carrboro has risen by tens of thousands of dollars. Rents have also risen substantially.
Go BIG When Funding the Work of Replacing Carrboro’s Broken UDO
It’s clear that the current policy change isn’t going to happen without a surge of people and expertise. Fortunately, the Town Council is looking to hire a consulting firm to augment the Town Staff’s capacity.
What the data in the news report above and our neighbors’ 2024 survey comments tell us that is the risk of Carrboro underfunding the work of creating a new UDO is much greater than overfunding it.
The current budget has an initial number of $225,000 for this work in FY 25, with a note from the budget director that additional investment in the new UDO in FY 26 is also likely.
I encourage the Town Council to see if they can push that FY25 number to something closer to $350,000 to $400,000, to see if more work on replacing the UDO can happen in the next 12 months. If we do this and can figure out a way to advance the work with a different cadence than our current processes, I think we will likely spend a similar amount of funds on the work over 2 years, but we will do more to meet our housing challenge sooner by getting more work complete and getting to policy adoption faster.
If you agree that fighting for more affordability sooner is important, please email Town Council and encourage them to increase funding for a new Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) in the FY 25 Town Budget.