POLICY | Wealthy People Are Winning
NIMBY homeowners are treating affordable housing as “The New Redlining”
Written By Dave Olverson
Progressive cities across the South say they want more affordable housing, but how much of this statement is just posturing? Here in Durham, 83 percent of low-income housing is crammed into 5 percent of its residentially-zoned land. This imbalance is a gigantic missed opportunity for affordability. It also relegates our most vulnerable citizens to less desirable parts of town.
At face value, it looks like Durham is making progress on affordable housing. According to a report from the City, in 2019, there were “approximately 1,036 affordable housing units…subsidized by local government revenue or that have local government oversight” and 3,677 affordable units created through the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). Separately, the Durham Housing Authority (DHA) operates “1,201 Public Housing units and manages 3,078 Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) for area landlords.”
But where are these 2,237 units of housing located? Researching the LIHTC units, I found one duplex that used the incentive to create affordable housing. And there are 128 single-family or duplex public housing units managed by DHA. The remainder are located in larger apartment complexes.(1)
Finally, there are other organizations that provide a smaller number of affordable units such as the Durham Community Land Trust (a mix of apartment buildings and single-family homes) and Habitat for Humanity Durham, which sells its affordable single-family homes. For simplicity, I am leaving these organizations out of the calculation below.
The end result is that an estimated 17 percent of affordable homes are single-family or duplex, and an estimated 83 percent of affordable homes are in larger apartment buildings or complexes. So, what’s the point of all those numbers? Rentals are primarily in apartment buildings or complexes. What’s the big deal?
The big deal is that the NIMBYs have won by keeping affordable housing out of their single-family residential neighborhoods. Looking at Durham’s land use, 95 percent of the acreage used for residential is zoned for single-family or duplex. That sounds like far too reminiscent of redlining for comfort. The mechanisms may be different, but the result is the same: Certain folks are not allowed in certain parts of the city (in this case, the vast majority of the city).(2)
Perhaps more important than the numbers listed above is an examination of the motivations behind them. The programs that create the most housing have an incentive to do so at scale. It makes very little sense to jump through regulatory hoops 100 times for 100 homes when you can jump through once and still build 100 homes.
What should we do? Southern cities must be able to create affordable housing not just at the scale that’s needed, but also in an equitable way—and in equitable locations. For that to happen, leaders have to continue upzoning, or do away with, single-family zones while also making it easier (or even turnkey) to obtain incentives for building affordable housing.
(1) I don’t have the resources to find out how many of the Durham-subsidized and regulated units or families with vouchers are in apartments versus single-family homes. One study found that in New Orleans, 50 percent of section 8 families are actually living in LIHTC projects. That doesn’t mean that the other 50 percent are in single-family homes or duplexes. As a conservative estimate, I will assume 50 percent of voucher families not in LIHTC housing are in apartment buildings or complexes. I will also assume that the vast majority of Durham-subsidized housing is in apartment buildings and complexes, but being conservative again, I will estimate that number at 50 percent.
(2) For more background on these complex topics, see, for example: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, July 2016; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017); and Robert Gioielli, “The Tyranny Of The Map: Rethinking Redlining,” The Metropole, November 3, 2022.