One Developer Withdraws, Another Emerges as City Struggles to Attract Affordable Housing

Workforce Homestead Inc., which has tried for five years to bring federally backed affordable housing to Brevard, has abandoned plans for a project on Fisher Road and, maybe, future work here.

BREVARD — Workforce Homestead Inc. withdrew its rezoning application for a planned affordable housing project on Fisher Road Thursday and suggested it may be ending its five-year effort to bring such badly needed developments to Transylvania County.

Workforce President Jim Yamin sent an email announcing his decision to Brevard Planning Director Paul Ray and to City Council members, who had been set to renew discussion of the rezoning at a special session on Monday.

Though the Fisher Road project, called Juniper, as well as other recent Workforce proposals faced adamant opposition from many nearby residents, Yamin did not cite that as a factor in his decision.

“The project ultimately fell victim to decreased subsidized funding, steadily increasing development costs and, most recently, sharply increasing financing costs,” he wrote.

Yamin did not explicitly say he would abandon plans to build future projects in or near Brevard, but his email took a tone of farewell and said the adverse financial conditions seem likely to worsen in the “foreseeable future.”

His decision leaves one project in the city with a chance to receive federal funds — Fairhaven Meadows, planned for a 4.6-acre site on Asheville Highway near Ecusta Road.

If it receives funding, the project will be constructed by a national builder of affordable housing, Commonwealth Development Corporation, said a company vice president, Sean Brady, who is based in Atlanta.

Unlike Juniper, Fairhaven is not near a large number of neighbors who might offer objections. Most of the property is also zoned Neighborhood Mixed Use, which allows a density of up to 25 units per acre.

“We’ve just flown under the radar because we were already zoned and had all our entitlements,” said Brady, though he added that he has talked to City Council members and staffers about his project. He has also received a letter of support from Transylvania County, he said.

The Fairhaven property, like the Juniper parcel, is close enough to grocery stores, pharmacies, schools and other resources to score highly in the competition for the federal tax credits that will help finance the project.

The 60-unit development has access to city water and sewer lines, and is near the city’s multi-use Estatoe Trail, which will increase transportation options for its residents, Brady said.

Council member Aaron Baker said that, though the plans for Fairhaven are welcome, they won’t begin to address the city and county’s need for affordable housing. And if Workforce is shutting the doors on working here in the future, Baker said, it represents a major setback in the effort to bring reasonably priced units to the area.

“Absolutely,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of options to make a dent on this issue in the short term and I’m pretty concerned about that . . . There are people leaving the city and county every day because of the housing situation.”

Yamin’s decision should serve as a call for the city to put additional focus on its work to redraw its land-use plans, he said.

“We need a complete change in our thinking about density,” Baker said. “Even though Brevard is a rural city, we kind of have some of the same issues as a big city has because of the lack of buildable land.”

Yamin and Amy Fisher, of Fisher Realty, who helped him secure potential development sites, emphasized the difficulty of finding such parcels during the discussion of Juniper at last Monday’s City Council meeting.

That discussion had been paused, with plans to renew discussions about adding infrastructure in the neighborhood to accommodate the project at a special session on Monday. Though that session must be reopened because it is a continuation of the earlier public hearing, those concerns will not be discussed, the city said.

Brady, of Commonwealth, agreed that parcels for affordable housing are hard to find in and near Brevard.

“There’s not a lot of flat land that meets all the other criteria,” Brady said.

The Fairhaven parcel, on the highway between Rustling Woods Drive and Laurel Mountain Road, is on a hillside and presents “development challenges,” he said.

But the steepest section is to the rear of the property and will remain undisturbed, he said; the slopes on the remaining property are gentle enough that they can be accommodated with split-level construction and still be built at a competitive price of about $180,000 per unit.

Workforce president Jim Yamin, who did not immediately respond to requests for comments on Thursday, said in an interview earlier this week that he was aware of the Asheville Highway property, but didn’t pursue construction there because of the slope and its location far from other residential neighborhoods.

“When I look up and down Asheville Highway, I don’t see a lot of residential development along that strip. I see a lot of commercial,” he said.

But he and Brady said there was plenty of demand for two projects, and they had hoped that both would receive backing.

“I’m sure that both Jim and I would echo that sentiment, that there’s more than enough demand for both projects and I think it would be fantastic if both of them could move forward,” Brady said before learning about Yamin’s decision.

A regional housing report completed late last year by Bowen National Research found Transylvania required nearly 500 income-restricted units to house its low-income and working residents. The company counted precisely zero available affordable units and reported long waiting lists of prospective tenants at the complexes that offer them.

The units at Fairhaven will be available to residents earning between 40 and 70 percent of the county’s median income, which for individuals is $59,092. This figure is higher for larger households, meaning that one-income families headed by starting teachers or law enforcement officers could qualify to live there, Brady said, as well as “a lot of clerical and restaurant and retail workers.”

Though several Council members expressed concern about a lack of infrastructure in the Fisher Road neighborhood, all of them recognized the need to house such workers.

For a while, Brady said, it looked as if both projects could be funded by the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency, which distributes federal housing funds in the state. Applications to apply for this assistance are due next Friday. 

Because of the damage caused by Tropical Storm Fred last summer, the agency “added a new provision that allowed disaster recovery counties, like Transylvania . . . to be eligible for two awards,” Brady said.

But because of rising construction costs, the agency last week lifted a cap on the amount each project can receive. More money spent per development from the same limited pool of money likely means that fewer of them will receive awards, he said.

“Everybody’s construction costs are just ballooning,” Brady said. “It’s really alarming.”

“I think it’s unfortunate that the housing agency made that decision so late in the game,” Yamin, who has a long record of building affordable housing projects in the state, said earlier this week. “It could have been much more beneficial and useful if they had made that decision right up front.”

In his email to the city, Yamin wrote that “your uniquely beautiful community inspired a particular dedication in my heart to spare no effort to develop affordable housing there.”

The city has been a “steadfast and sincere partner in my work over each of the past five years to bring in such a much-needed asset,” he continued.

“It breaks my heart that I couldn’t fulfill that goal.”

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