On June 1, 2020, the Wake County Housing Justice Coalition has submitted to the City of Raleigh a long document titled, “Written Recommendations to Raleigh’s Proposed Affordable Housing Bond, Framework for Equitable Economic Development”.
Since Wake County Housing Justice Coalition came into being, the core members have advocated for housing justice, starting with the call for Raleigh’s affordable housing bond to commit to building affordable housing to people at 30% AMI level.
Our call for housing affordable to 30% AMI has led the city to change the policy to discuss 30% of the AMI, but not to our satisfaction by the time they proceeded to put the affordable housing bond on the ballot in 2020.
Since the passing of Raleigh’s affordable housing bond, evictions and displacements have been at an all time high, as property values in lower wealth communities continue to soar, prompting media outlets to highlight and publish investigative series on gentrification and the exacerbated eviction crisis caused by the current pandemic but undergirded by gentrification and inequitable growth occurring in Raleigh.
Growth friendly rezoning decisions by the current Raleigh City Council have caused certain neighborhoods to be labeled “Tear Down Street,” by the Raleigh News & Observer. City leaders continue to discuss the building of future affordable housing in other areas but refuse to lay out a plan for preserving current naturally occurring affordable housing. In a recent meeting around the possible future displacement of Quail Ridge residents, a Raleigh City planner stated that preserving affordable housing is difficult, while continuing to talk about how future land use maps allow the rezoning of the Quail Ridge apartment area for future mixed use redevelopment.
Advocates have raised solutions but city leaders spend most of their time chasing fires that they’ve created through their rezoning and growth policies. Such policies fail to ground equitable development.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CYIGm5yLXvz/
Equity is not just in the process of policies, equity has to be the outcome of housing policies. Evidence of such rezoning polices include the city council’s approval of the rezoning of Downtown South to the development and rezoning approval around Dorothea Dix Park. Lower wealth residents around Dix Park were recently given notices right before Christmas that they would have to move. Yet, city planners discuss how “housing for all,” will be the goal for housing in this area. This objective ignores the human damage occurring currently because of the current planning and rezoning of this area.
The city claims to be building housing for all, but what they kept quiet about is the teardowns of the existing naturally occurring affordable housing, and how they consistently give away city-owned properties to private developers. Such is the case with Heritage Park, which the WCHJC is fighting hard to protect right now.
On July 2021, the city voted to approve the text change TC-5-20, which would put an even bigger target on low-income housing. The city and the press praised themselves for building their own vision of “affordable housing”, but in reality, communities are being erased by their gentrification and displacement.
How is anyone in the area going to afford this? Who is getting evicted to allow for wealthier people to occupy the space?
The practice of gentrification is no different from the practice of colonizers. It is the same game, but just a different name. Be aware. Fight back against the gentrifiers and colonizers.
This is why our work continues in 2022.
