The central Raleigh Longacres neighborhood Linda Williams moved into with her family in the mid-1990s gets high marks these days for walkability.
It’s a half mile or so on foot from her white picket-fenced, modest 1,200 square foot, two-story, two-and-a-half bath, 1995-vintage Worth Street home to a nearby elementary school and middle school, and a few blocks from the entrance to John Chavis Memorial Park, a 29-acre urban wonder, built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, named for a Revolutionary War veteran, educator, and abolitionist, and a historical reminder of the area’s segregationist past.
Walkability in downtown Raleigh is a hot commodity, like in a lot of places, and people would gladly pay well into the mid-$300s for a property in a gentrifying neighborhood like Linda Williams', only she’s got other plans. Whether she could—on a fixed income—or would pay what it would cost to buy her home in today’s hot, fast-transitioning urban infill single-family market is a big question.
What's certain is that she loves the home she's lived in for more than two decades, and she aims to stay another two, if her life circumstances allow it.
“This is where I raised my kids, where my grandson opens his Christmas gifts, where my Mother had her 75th birthday party,” said Williams. “This is the place we all call home and a place I want to continue to call home for 20 more years.”
Having spent many years with the Raleigh Housing Authority helping others attain or stay in their homes, Mrs. Williams had wherewithal to deal with the ins and outs of bureaucratic systems, but what she doubted she'd ever be able to do was to give the house the kind of thorough refresh it needed to fix what was tired looking or broken over the 20 years of natural family wear and tear.
So, this week, thanks to an urban acupuncture-like approach to neighborhood revitalization--one that teams public and private stakeholders Ply Gem, Habitat for Humanity, a host of local trade crews and supply companies, and one of country music's biggest rising stars--Mrs. Williams and four other homeowners in the Longacres neighborhood are celebrating a major exterior makeover of each of their five homes, completed in one-week's time, as part of the kick-off of Ply Gem's third consecutive annual Home for Good project to make more homes accessible to more people.
“I am just ecstatic,” said Williams. “To know my home will be taken care of and I will no longer have to worry about when my last day here will be is such a relief. I’m so thankful for this opportunity and honored to be working with the team and volunteers from the Ply Gem Home for Good project.”
Habitat for Humanity of Wake County president and ceo Kevin Campbell notes that the five homes are among 50 renovations Habitat is taking on this year in Wake County, along with 70 new-home builds.
"The data showed that if we could refresh and improve 15% of the homes in the Longacres neighborhood--about 23 homes--we could find that tipping point where the community would shift from declining to improving," Campbell says. "Now, we're seeing the impact in lower crime rates, healthier residents, and you see other owners starting to do work on their own homes to make them look like the ones we've helped to renovate."
It hardly makes any sense to call it a housing crisis.
Each month, the Labor Department puts out data that shows headcounts are growing and the percentage of unemployed is shrinking. Each month, the Census Bureau releases equally positive statistical evidence that housing--permits, starts, and sales--keeps making progress as the economy improves.
So, as jobs, and corporate profits, and housing's measures of growth, and even household incomes start to pick up momentum, how can we keep hearing of a housing crisis?
It's a reality. Cognitively, it may be a challenge, but in the real world, it's a fact there's no two ways around.
Yes, since the end of the Great Recession, the housing economy has met the needs of more renters and buyers as broader economic conditions improved, and housing activity made glacial gains over time. Discretionary buyers and well-to-do renters have matched up nicely to the new homes, new communities, new rental properties that have come online.
At the same time, especially for the huge and growing number of people on the financial margins of today's housing activity--those whose incomes are in the lower 40% to 50% of the salary or monthly wage spectrum--this "recovering" economy has been producing more and more people priced out of safe, healthy, economical, and secure places to live.
For that huge and growing number of people, it's only fair to say it's a housing crisis. Everywhere we turn, there are headlines, there are data points, there are tent cities, there are streams of out-migration, and there are more and more people like Linda Williams who can barely scrape by resources to live in communities they've lived in for a generation or more.
"Since the Recession, builders have built 3.2 million less for-sale homes than they would have based on historic measures of demand, and that puts an upward pressure on prices, because there's been so little housing developed and built at the low price ranges, and this vicious circle makes more and more housing less and less affordable," says Gary E. Robinette, chairman and ceo of Raleigh, N.C.-based building products manufacturer Ply Gem.
The deal is this. If you'll pay 40%, or 50%, or 60% of every dollar you can cobble together each month, you might be able to put a roof over your head. If builders and developers were able to boost production of single- and multifamily rental homes at a catch-up rate of 3.2 million for-sale, and 4.6 million rental properties by 2030, prices might begin to come back in line with accessibility's tolerance points stemming from household incomes.
Per Ply Gem press materials:
Nationally, one in four renting households spend at least 50 percent of their income on rent. In Wake County, some 42,000 households spend more than 50 percent of their monthly income on rent and another 49,000 households spend 30 to 50 percent of their incomes on rent. Already short 56,000 units, the county’s unmet need for affordable housing is growing by an estimated 3,400 units per year and could reach a total of 150,000 units by 2035 if no action is taken.
That calculus plays out in all the big cities and more and more of the middle-sized and smaller cities throughout the United States.
So, as much as Ply Gem's Home for Good project is a program of action, its dual mission involves carrying a louder and more urgent message to all stakeholders in housing's ecosystem of investors, manufacturers, materials suppliers, trades, builders, designers, developers, planners, and associated marketing and sales consultancies, as to the need to find a way to tip the balances back toward accessibility for more people.
"It's not just about building new homes more affordably, it's about preserving existing affordable structures, and making it so that people who are in them can continue to live affordably as their neighborhoods get more and more expensive," says Robinette.
That's why this years Home for Good project venture with Habitat will focus on renovations of homes, first in Raleigh, followed by a tour stop in Cleveland, and concluding later this summer with a week-long build in Anaheim in Orange County, Calif.
To help raise the volume on the urgency of its message to builders, investors, manufacturers, and policy-makers, Ply Gem has tapped country music star Brett Young--2018 ACM New Male Vocalist of the Year--as Home for Good ambassador.
“Having a place to come home to means a lot to me personally,” said Young. “I’m proud of what Ply Gem is doing to bring the affordable housing issue to light through its Home for Good project, and I am honored to help spread the word to my fan base.”
Whatever it takes. The crisis is systemic, and it's growing.
"This is a small step," says Robinette. "Our big focus is on trying to get out word, which is why it's so important that we have Brett with us in the campaign. Five houses in Raleigh, as important as they are to us and the families involved, is a drop in the bucket. But it's a start."
