by Jordan Wingate
This article originally appeared in the School of Social Work 2024 Spring Impact Report.
In the past decade, Durham and Chapel Hill residents have seen apartment buildings, townhome complexes and mixed-use structures burst into view along highways and in city centers.
But more housing hasn’t meant more housing for all. Even in the years since Durham residents passed a $95 million affordable housing bond in 2019, homelessness and the cost of living have continued to rise. Chapel Hill’s inclusionary zoning policy stipulates that developers must earmark 15% of new units as affordable housing, but it exempts rentals from this requirement — an easily exploitable loophole.
Now, two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty members and a local community partner are pooling their expertise to take a hard look at the effects of structural racism on affordable housing in Durham and Orange counties.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the team is conducting a 3-year study led by the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF), a local nonprofit that provides financial coaching and employment support to people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Drawing together a rich mix of historical policy data, environmental data, and interview data from CEF members, the study promises to bring fresh insights to CEF and local policymakers about the factors that are solving or amplifying housing needs in these two North Carolina counties.
“We’re a natural community partner for this work,” said Donna Carrington, CEF’s executive director. “We engage people from all over Orange and Durham counties, and we’ve been keeping up with data on housing and employment circumstances.”
The post-pandemic years have been particularly challenging for CEF’s members, as stimulus checks and eviction moratoriums ended, and landlords began to raise rents at unprecedented rates while growing industry in the Triangle sparked a population influx, Carrington noted. “Most of CEF’s members are at a 12% to 15% area median income, or $12,000 to $15,000. There’s no housing at those price points anymore,” she said.
The team’s analysis began with a dive into the interflowing political, infrastructural and environmental histories that shaped Chapel Hill and Durham’s affordable housing landscape today. Such histories include discriminatory zoning practices in Chapel Hill and in Durham, practices that disproportionately shut Black and brown residents out of the housing market and forced them into neighborhoods in less desirable areas. And what made those areas less desirable?
“With a drainage or topographical map, I could probably tell you where the low-wealth areas are,” said Danielle Spurlock, a core project collaborator and associate professor in UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning.
Affordable housing, she noted, is often built on cheaper land, which is typically cheaper due to drainage or flooding concerns and its lack of “green infrastructure,” or infrastructure that can protect people from the impacts of climate change (e.g., tree canopy, which helps cool homes and absorb storm water runoff). Climate change will likely expand old floodplains.
“The regular flooding (in 2000, 2008, 2013, 2015, and 2018) of communities like Camelot Village in Chapel Hill captures how residents today are bearing the burden of economically unjust housing practices and policies,” said Spurlock.
The team’s research into the histories shaping the affordable housing landscape in Durham and Chapel Hill provides a backdrop for their project’s current phase, which is assessing how structural racism in the housing system is affecting CEF members today. Through interviews with CEF members, the team will gather data about their well-being and housing outcomes (e.g., food security, physical and mental health), and use that data to enhance CEF programming and make evidence-based recommendations to local policymakers about how to improve local affordable housing options in environmentally just ways.
“We want to have some ideas about how we can suggest government dollars are spent on affordable housing: where it’s located, how it’s provided and how it’s maintained,” said Allison De Marco, the project’s third core member and an adjunct professor in UNC’s School of Social Work and advanced research scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
This interdisciplinary study will also provide further evidence of the myriad interconnections between a person’s environment, housing and health. “We’re hoping that showing the linkage between housing and health outcomes will help people to see housing as a right rather than a market good,” Spurlock said.
Even before her tenure as CEF’s executive director, Carrington recognized the connections between housing and health.
“As a person who has experienced housing insecurity, I realized long ago that it affects your mental health,” she said, tracing a “vicious cycle” by which housing insecurity affects mental health, which can in turn affect employment and economic security, further reducing housing options. Her expertise highlights the benefits of community organization partnerships for policymaking and research.
“She has a 30,000-foot understanding of how the housing system works and where it breaks down,” Spurlock said.
