Housing policy is one of the animating issues in Durham these days, and everybody and their NIMBY grandma has an opinion on how to approach the problem. A new website called the Durham Housing Dashboard offers a high-level look into the current state of housing in the Bull City, along with a report detailing recommendations to address everything from homelessness, to affordable housing, to homeownership.
The dashboard shows data on homeownership, rental affordability, housing supply, demographics and the local economy in Durham as well as a number of other peer cities—Boston, Nashville, Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle and more—for comparison. Most of the current data set ends in 2023, but as new data becomes available, the dashboard will automatically update. The Durham Chamber Foundation, with funding from the City of Durham, Durham County, and Duke University, contracted with HR&A Advisors, a real estate and economic development consultancy, to create the dashboard. The Chamber previously ran the campaign for the 2019 Affordable Housing Bond.
“Whether you’re for or against more housing, you tend to use data that supports your argument,” says Matt Gladdek, vice president of economic development at the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce. “The goal of this was to get an independent organization that were experts in this to create a dashboard for us that houses our data as well as comparable peer city data, so that organizations and people that are concerned about housing affordability and housing supply have the same set of data to work off of.”
Housing is one of the most significant challenges facing residents and local officials. But Durham isn’t the only city staring down major growth in the coming years. So how does Durham stack up against its peers?
Durham home values jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the median home value was $280,362; last year, it was $416,000. Other growing cities, like Nashville and Denver, incurred similar rates of growth. But Durham has maintained a relatively high rate of homeownership over the last decade at around 55 percent, compared to Nashville at 53 percent, Denver at 49 percent, and Boston at 35 percent.
Eleven percent of Durham homeowners are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend between 30 and 49 percent of their household income on housing, and 7 percent are “severely cost-burdened,” those who spend 50 percent or more on housing. Those numbers are slightly more favorable than other comparable cities.
Renters have also seen an uptick in costs. The income required to afford median rent in Durham—$1,623 per month—is $55,230. That’s compared to $41,686 and $1,272, respectively, in 2020. Cities like Minneapolis and Seattle jumped at a similar rate, while Boston’s median rent is almost a thousand dollars higher than it was five years ago.
And for a city that aims to be more densely populated, Durham’s housing typology, the style of units, suggests it has ground to make up. Fifty-five percent of Durham homes are single family, which ranks higher compared to peer cities like Nashville (50 percent), Minneapolis (41 percent), Seattle (38 percent) and Boston (12 percent).
These datasets are only part of the picture, but they provide basic information about Durham housing “in layman’s terms, and not in any specialized statistician terms or demographer terms,” Gladdek says.
The Durham Housing Initiative Task Force, made up of dozens of representatives from nonprofits, faith-based organizations, developers and others connected to housing work, published an accompanying 58-page report on the dashboard website that offers a comprehensive look at the past, present and future of housing in Durham.
City council member Javiera Caballero was chosen to lead the task force, which is made up of five subcommittees: pre-housing shelter, supportive services, subsidy gap funding, workforce housing, and land use.
Those subcommittees made a number of recommendations that include items already in consideration by local leaders like opening a day shelter, streamlining the city and county’s development review process, and prioritizing publicly-owned land for affordable housing projects, as well as initiatives like a new affordable housing bond that would require longer-term planning. Many of the recommendations were consistent across subcommittees, Caballero says, underscoring that the need for more affordable housing is not the job, or the burden, of any one entity.
“Obviously, the city is the lead agency for many of our housing strategies and work, and certainly funded a ton of housing units. But, in my view, that is a very limited way to look at housing,” Callabero says. “If you ask anyone in Durham, one of the top three issues they’re going to tell you about is housing, whether it’s Duke hearing it because of their workforce, or their students trying to find graduate student housing; DPS is in the same boat. So we need to get out of, ‘it’s the city’s job to solve this big problem.’”
The city might be the lead agency, but they aren’t the only agency building out Durham’s housing supply. In May, the Renegade, a project on the 300 block of East Main Street that was developed on county-owned land, started taking applications. The city, county and school system have also been working to build a collective record of all their publicly-held land, including Durham’s aging high schools, for potential future developments.
But publicly-initiated projects are just one approach. The path forward requires a variety of methods and practitioners, as reflected in the flood of recent op-eds from city officials and vested private citizens on the subject. In 2019, residents voted to approve a $95 million dollar housing bond, which the city coupled with other local and federal funding sources to build and repair thousands of affordable housing units. But with an increase in city and county property tax rates (and costs of living) in recent years, residents may not have as much of an appetite for another housing bond. How far can the city go without raising taxes, or without an increasingly less-reliable source like federal funding?
“Obviously, money is great, but that was the other focus of the report,” Caballero says. “It’s not just about money. What are the things that we’re doing in our work that are making it more difficult to deliver housing of all kinds, whether it is a market rate unit or a unit for a special population like a permanent supportive housing unit?”
The Durham Planning Department is in the process of writing a new unified development ordinance (UDO) to realign the rules for building with the UDO’s sister document, the comprehensive plan. Housing Task Force representatives are hopeful that folks can find consensus on what new rules will give Durham the best chance to build all the types of housing it needs to support the lives Durhamites seek to build for themselves.
“Affordable housing is super important for Durham, but so is building the Novus on what was mostly a surface parking lot. We need both ends of that spectrum in Durham,” Gladdek says, referring to a new luxury apartment building downtown. “As we are looking to increase the quality of jobs in Durham, [The Chamber] works a lot with Durham Tech to make sure that there’s true economic and social mobility available in Durham. We need good jobs available to do that, and companies are interested in moving here when the housing prices are affordable. As our housing prices go up, the companies that are interested in opening up and moving here or expanding here are companies with really high paying jobs, and we want a Durham that is economically and racially diverse, and so part of that is making sure that our housing stays affordable, and part of that is building housing.”
Last year, local officials traveled to St.Paul-Minneapolis for an intercity visit to pick up tips and learn more about shifts in policy the Twin Cities recently implemented. In 2021, St. Paul’s city council passed a rent control ordinance, which caused an enormous drop in new construction and has received pushback from landlords who say it hurts their bottomline and advocates who say the ordinance didn’t go far enough when it was implemented in 2023. In neighboring Minneapolis, the city saw a 20 percent decline in rental costs after eliminating single-family zoning, allowing for additional housing types such as ADUs and duplexes in zoning districts previously restricted to only single-family homes, and parking mandates in 2017.
Nashville, another peer city listed on the housing dashboard, has a population twice the size of Durham. In 2023, they issued more than double the number of building permits as Durham for housing construction, but their homeownership rate, median rent cost, and median household income are roughly the same.
Each policy decision is a lever that local officials have at their disposal to manage housing needs. While there is an opportunity to learn from peer cities, there’s no guarantee that what works in Minneapolis or Nashville will directly map onto Durham, especially given North Carolina’s preemption laws. The report from the Housing Task Force highlights that everyone, whether you’re Abundance-pilled or a diehard NIMBY, has a stake in Durham’s future growth, and a part to play in finding solutions.
“If anyone tells you that there’s a silver bullet for housing, they’re lying, or they don’t know enough about the subject,” Gladdek says. “I think the important thing to remember is that everyone wants housing to be affordable, and so we all might disagree on how to get there, but everyone wants the same goal.”
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