Home Truths: A UNC-community Partnership Maps Structural Racism’s Effects on Triangle’s Affordable Housing

CORE TEAM

Donna Carrington (Community Empowerment Fund), Allison De Marco (UNC School of Social Work and Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute), Danielle Spurlock (UNC Department of City and Regional Planning)

In the past decade, Durham and Chapel Hill residents have seen apartment buildings, townhome complexes and mixed-use structures burst into view along highways and in city centers.

But more housing hasn’t meant more housing for all. Even in the years since Durham residents passed a $95 million affordable housing bond in 2019, homelessness and the cost of living have continued to rise. Chapel Hill’s inclusionary zoning policy stipulates that developers must earmark 15% of new units as affordable housing, but it exempts rentals from this requirement — an easily exploitable loophole.

Now, two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty members and a local community partner are pooling their expertise to take a hard look at the effects of structural racism on affordable housing in Durham and Orange counties.

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the team is conducting a 3-year study led by the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF), a local nonprofit that provides financial coaching and employment support to people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Drawing together a rich mix of historical policy data, environmental data, and interview data from CEF members, the study promises to bring fresh insights to CEF and local policymakers about the factors that are solving or amplifying housing needs in these two North Carolina counties.

“We’re a natural community partner for this work,” said Donna Carrington, CEF’s executive director. “We engage people from all over Orange and Durham counties, and we’ve been keeping up with data on housing and employment circumstances.”

The post-pandemic years have been particularly challenging for CEF’s members, as stimulus checks and eviction moratoriums ended, and landlords began to raise rents at unprecedented rates while growing industry in the Triangle sparked a population influx, Carrington noted. “Most of CEF’s members are at a 12% to 15% area median income, or $12,000 to $15,000. There’s no housing at those price points anymore,” she said.

The team’s analysis began with a dive into the interflowing political, infrastructural and environmental histories that shaped Chapel Hill and Durham’s affordable housing landscape today. Such histories include discriminatory zoning practices in Chapel Hill and in Durham, practices that disproportionately shut Black and brown residents out of the housing market and forced them into neighborhoods in less desirable areas. And what made those areas less desirable?

“With a drainage or topographical map, I could probably tell you where the low-wealth areas are,” said Danielle Spurlock, a core project collaborator and associate professor in UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning.

Affordable housing, she noted, is often built on cheaper land, which is typically cheaper due to drainage or flooding concerns and its lack of “green infrastructure,” or infrastructure that can protect people from the impacts of climate change (e.g., tree canopy, which helps cool homes and absorb storm water runoff). Climate change will likely expand old floodplains.