Neighborhood Opposition: A Major Obstacle to the Crucial Job of Building Affordable Housing
The arguments of neighbors fighting a planned affordable housing project near Brevard are compelling, advocates say, but so is the crushing need for reasonably priced apartments.
BREVARD — Woodland Terrace climbs from North Country Club Road and curves past spacious homes and lots, then drops and curves again before reaching a wooded, 8.3-acre lot at the corner of Meadow Lane.
With these road conditions and low-density surroundings, that parcel is clearly the wrong spot for a planned 84-unit affordable housing development, said Ned Steadman, a retired Brevard High School teacher and Meadow Lane resident.
“It’s going to stick out like a sore thumb . . . The main thing I’m concerned about — I’d like the character of the neighborhood to be maintained,” said Steadman, one of the leaders of a group of neighbors seeking to stop the the project’s rezoning and annexation into the city of Brevard, which the city’s Planning Board is set to discuss tonight.
Earlier this month, these neighbors gathered to circulate a petition and plan their opposition. They talked not just about traffic but fears of flooding. They argued the development would be a better fit in another part of the county. Some of them are also skeptical of claims that it will house teachers and other workers who are especially valuable to the community.
City Council member Geraldine Dinkins understands these concerns, she said; dense development does change residential neighborhoods.
But though she hasn’t taken a position on the rezoning — due to come before Council in March — she also said that such community resistance is one of the biggest obstacles to addressing one of the county’s greatest needs.
“As I’ve said before, the house is on fire,” Dinkins said, speaking about an affordable housing crisis vividly portrayed in a new regional report that documented rock-bottom wages for many Transylvania County workers, sky-high real estate prices, and a need for nearly 500 new income-targeted residential units.
And though not-in-my-backyard resistance to affordable development is universal enough that it’s acquired a familiar nickname — NIMBYism — it’s especially likely to crop up in Transylvania, where the scarcity of developable land means any such projects will likely be built among existing uses.
But affordable housing advocates say this resistance is often based on inaccurate information and the lingering “stigma” of affordable housing. It can be countered by facts, they say, and by reminding residents that the very nature of the city and county are at stake.
“We have to make a choice,” Dinkins said. “We have to decide whether we want to be just a playground for wealthy people or a real, live community.”
A Futile Search for Land
One bedrock requirement for building affordable housing — especially at the density needed to make a dent in the county’s vast need — is access to utilities.
Opponents of the project planned for Woodland Terrace, called Falling Waters, have seized on news that the county recently received $9 million in grant and state funding aimed at expanding the town of Rosman’s sewer and water systems. Some of this money was specifically earmarked to support affordable housing and much of it will be spent bolstering utility service in the U.S. 64 corridor between Rosman and Brevard.
“I just wish they could buy a piece of land out there and wait for utilities to come,” Sandy Watson, who lives near Woodland Terrace, said of Falling Waters’ developers.
But utilities alone won’t prime the corridor for affordable projects, said Amy Fisher, a Brevard Realtor representing the company behind Falling Waters, Workforce Homestead Inc. of Chapel Hill.
The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency, which distributes federal and state funds for affordable projects, ranks them based on various factors, key among which is easy access to resources such schools, shopping and medical care, Fisher said.
That means only sites in or near Brevard can hope to succeed in the fierce competition for funding, she said. These parcels must be close enough to town to avoid high connection costs to city utilities — which doomed a previous application for Falling Waters on Rosman Highway and Nicholson Creek Road. Also, she said, the lots should cover at least five acres.
“Finding five undeveloped acres in the city of Brevard? Good luck,” she said. “Good Luck!”
If she does find such a parcel, its development is likely to clash with the desires of people who live nearby. Neighbors have fought almost every recent proposal to build affordable and workforce housing in the county, including Workforce Homestead’s plan to build on on seven acres near Brevard High School, which the Transylvania County School Board shot down last month.
All of which, Fisher said, helps explain why she has unsuccessfully sought feasible parcels on Workforce Homestead’s behalf for five years.
“We’ve tried multiple properties,” she said. “And failed.”
Flooding and Traffic
Almost any additional traffic in the Woodland Terrace neighborhood would be too much traffic, residents said.
The roads are narrow, winding, and frequented by cyclists and walkers. Traffic already spikes to hazardous levels before and after classes at nearby Brevard High School, and poor sightlines plague two intersections along Woodland and at its access points on North Country Club and Rosman Highway, said Trish Szypulski, who lives on a cul-de-sac off Woodland.
“All four of those intersections are dangerous,” she said.
Fisher countered this narrative by saying the impact of “such a small project” doesn’t even warrant a traffic study — a statement supported by both Paul Ray, Brevard’s planning director, and Lonnie Watkins, state Department of Transportation engineer for the district that includes Transylvania.
Residential units can be expected to generate roughly 10 inbound and outbound trips per day, or a total of about 800 for Falling Waters. City law automatically requires traffic studies when that estimated number rises above 2,000 trips, while the state’s threshold is 3,000, said Watkins, who also addressed another issue raised by residents — the crumbling pavement on Country Club.
The department plans to spend more than $600,000 for the road’s upgrade, which will include repaving and sidewalk improvements, he said. This job, as well as a planned resurfacing of Woodland Terrace, is due to be finished later this year.
The projects will not add lanes, and neither of these roads — nor Rosman Highway — are anywhere near busy enough to require it, according to DOT policy.
Though gauging road capacity depends on a variety of factors such as “the number of driveways and intersections, terrain (and) lane width,” Watkins wrote in an email, the department “generally” considers congestion a problem when traffic is busy enough to “Level of Service D.”
The lower limit of that level for two-lane roads such as Country Club and Woodland Terrace is 9,000 cars per day, according to state guidelines.
According to the department’s map of traffic volume on state roads, the average count of daily trips on much of Country Club — 4,400 — comes to less than half that threshold. The total drops by half again by the point it intersects with Woodland, on which the average number of daily trips is in the hundreds — a small fraction of the capacity for two-lane roads.
Four-lane roads such as Rosman Highway, meanwhile, can typically accommodate about 25,000 per day before congestion becomes a concern, while the current daily count is 10,000 trips below that number.
Watkins understands that such figures don’t always match residents’ perceptions. “Everybody has traffic and everybody thinks they have the worst traffic,” he said.
But based on the numbers, he added, “you could conclude that (Falling Waters) would not have a major impact, or we would require, or the city would require, a study to be done.”
As for flooding, city development laws require projects to “contain all stormwater on the subject property,” Fisher told residents at their organizational meeting. Falling Waters “is not going to contribute to additional flooding on your property and it might even help it.”
Steadman is well aware of the city’s requirements, he said, but he also pointed out that the project will add impermeable surfaces, including “a lot of pavement,” and that retention ponds and storm sewers are only designed to contain runoff from routine storms, not from increasingly common epic rain events.
City planning officials “told me that if there’s a 100-year flood or a 500-year flood, it will overflow the system,” he said.
That’s true for Falling Waters, said Ray, but it’s also true for every development.
“There’s no way to build a system that would contain a 100-year storm,” he said, and Falling Waters will need to control “all of the storm water from the site and it needs to take out all the solids and release (the runoff) slowly into a conveyance system.”
“Runoff is managed,” he said, “and it’s managed very well.”
“Workforce” Housing?
Falling Waters, according to documents submitted to the city, will primarily be funded by a federal program that grants developers tax credits, which they can sell to investors to cover most of a project’s construction costs.
In return, the program sets income limits for residents, who at Falling Waters will earn from 40 to 80 percent of the county’s median income — currently about $59,100, according to the federal department of Housing and Urban Development.
This range, Fisher said, means Falling Waters will be an “affordable workforce housing” development, and a booklet the project distributed to residents at the meeting says its income requirements “will enable affordability to a wide swath of households working in various sectors of the local economy.”
Many units will be open to child care workers, cashiers, construction workers and hair stylists, the booklet says, and some will accommodate workers earning the upper range of those limits, including correctional officers, nurses and even teachers.
You could quibble with Fisher’s use of the word “workforce housing,” said Sheryl Fortune, who recently retired as housing director at WNCSource, formerly known as Western Carolina Community Action.
Though there is no formal definition of workforce housing, she said, the term is usually applied to housing within the reach of tenants earning between 80 and 120 percent of area median income, for whom there are few available subsidies.
“There’s nothing for the middle,” Fortune said.
The label “affordable housing,” on the other hand, is usually reserved for units available to residents making less than 80 percent of median, which is also HUD's definition of “low-income” housing.
“This is being deceptively played on us that this is going to be workforce housing,” Szypulski said.
A retired speech pathologist who worked in schools, she thinks the emphasis should be on housing teachers, which was also a priority for some School Board members who rejected the plan to build on the Brevard High property.
Teachers “are real foundational people for this whole community. If we can’t attract teachers because of housing, that’s a serious problem much more than the cashiers and the CNAs (certified nursing assistants) and so forth,” she said.
“I’m not trying to downplay them, but they are a little more dime a dozen.”
Workers in Affordable Housing
But as even Szypulski’s comments suggest, Fisher’s use of the word “workforce” housing gets at a larger truth: Large numbers of workers in Transylvania can only afford to live in tax-credit or other income-restricted housing.
The average annual wage of Transylvania renters — as distinguished from a property owners — is just $10.33 per hour, according to a December study of housing in Western North Carolina conducted by Bowen National Research and commissioned by Dogwood Health Trust.
An apartment consuming 30 percent of that income — the standard measure of affordability — would cost $537 per month, meaning the county’s much higher market-rate rents are far out of the reach of such workers.
The combination of low earnings and high real estate prices have created intense demand for income-restricted housing, in which there is not only a zero vacancy rate countywide, the report said, but long waiting lists of potential tenants.
To fill this demand — to house all working-age and 55-plus residents earning less than 80 percent of the median income — developers need to build a total of 487 income-restricted units, the report said.
It is possible for starting teachers and law-enforcement officers, especially those with large families, to meet that income standard, Fisher said.
But even workers who clearly qualify for affordable housing provide essential labor, added Fisher, who encouraged neighbors at the meeting to visit any restaurant or store in downtown Brevard.
“They are not able to maintain normal business hours because of a lack of staffing,” she said. “Brevard has a fabulous quality of life . . . but if we do not start providing housing for the service-industry providers, for the CNAs, for the medical support we need here, that quality of life will start to deteriorate.”
Overcoming the Low-Income “Stigma”
Most neighbors of the Falling Waters site say they don’t need to be convinced of the need for affordable housing projects, which they say they are generally all for. And it’s the density of the project planned for their neighborhood that concerns them, not the prospect of living near low-income residents.
“I would never characterize low-income people as being less moral than others,” Szypulski said. But she did say Falling Waters, like other tax-credit developments, is just a modern alternative to the low-income housing historically built and operated by government entities.
“They’re calling it affordable workforce housing,” she said, “but it's really just a privatized project.”
And to some people, Fisher said, that conjures images that she is convinced contributes to the opposition.
Opponents “picture what you would see in the movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, these drug-infested, rat-infested projects that are full of crime, and it’s not like that at all,” she said. “These are really nice developments that you or I would live in.”
To prove this point, she welcomed neighbors to visit one of the many developments that Workforce Homestead has constructed across North Carolina.
Or they could drive down Old Hendersonville Highway to Broad River Terrace, a 62-unit tax-credit project built by a different developer in 2011.
Its three-story apartment buildings are covered by a blend of brick and siding, just like many of the homes on Woodland Terrace. Trees line its streets, which are flanked with neatly trimmed lawns and shrubs.
The complex has little history of criminal activity, said Public Safety Director Phil Harris, who was asked if it’s a trouble spot for Brevard Police Department’s officers.
“Absolutely not,” said Harris, who served the department’s chief for more than a decade.
Resident Sharon Thompson, 68, also said she has seen few signs of crime, not even the theft of packages by “porch pirates.”
She showed off the spacious two bedrooms in the apartment she shares with her autistic 15-year-old grandson, whose Social Security disability payments, along with her own, help pay the pay the rent.
Other than a leak from a nearby apartment — which management is addressing, she said — she offered no complaints about the living conditions at Broad River.
“People are friendly. It’s pretty quiet and the maintenance and groundskeepers are good,” she said.
Though the complex does not specifically cater to such disabled or older residents, said site manager Sury Marshall, they make up one of two the main groups of residents, with the other being low-wage workers.
One resident interviewed said she works as a bartender and server; another said she is a retired convenience-store manager while her husband, a retired mechanic, works full-time at Walmart.
No teachers live at the complex, Marshall said, though one is on its waiting list, which numbers 85 for one- and two-bedroom units, and 44 for three-bedroom apartments.
One of her tenants is a health-care worker, she said. Many more are employees of the nearby Ingles Market.
“We have good people here,” said Marshall, who said she knows the assumptions people make about such projects because once made them herself.
“I think a lot of us who have never been in affordable housing have that stigma, that it’s not going to be a great neighborhood,” she said.
“But we want this to be a nice neighborhood and I think it’s a beautiful neighborhood.”
Why does access to that development have to be thru Woodland Terrace? Construction costs (as well as damage to residential streets) could possibly be lowered if access went directly from a main road. (See the Broad River Terrace development off Hendersonville Hwy.)