Kelly Kenoyer: I'm here with Liz Carbone, a local housing advocate. Thank you so much for coming in to talk about the lay of the land halfway through this year.
Liz Carbone: Yeah, my pleasure. So let's start with the county.
KK: We have both some wins within the county, and also some major changes to funding from the county. So, can we start with some of the positives?
LC: So, projects that were funded through the now-defunct County Workforce Housing Services Program are either coming online, leasing up, tenants, moving in homeowners, or they're making really great progress in construction.
So some examples: Canopy Pointe up in the Ogden area, moving in seniors, medically fragile, and all the way up to workforce individuals. You know, people sometimes forget that senior housing is 55-plus, which means that those can be workers all the way up into your 80+ seniors. So, other great examples, Haven Place, which is Habitat for Humanity's larger home ownership community, is coming along. Pearson Point, another home ownership opportunity for the workforce townhomes that'll be priced around $250,000. All of those progress projects are progressing really well, and they're all doing that thanks to that Workforce Housing Services Fund.
KK: Are there other major wins that we've had in the county recently?
LC: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say directly from the New Hanover County government, but like cross-county successes, we've definitely seen some funds coming from the endowment into programs like the Cape Fear Land Trust. So they've received funds to purchase, build, and essentially create a land bank for home ownership opportunities that are affordable to working people around 80% area median income.
Good Shepherd Center recently received funding to work on a new family shelter coupled with permanent supportive housing. So we're definitely seeing great investments from the Endowment in regards to housing opportunities in the county, but still a little unclear over whether they're going to emerge as a real leader in the bigger conversation about a more impactful and more substantial Housing Trust Fund or some other type of funding mechanism that can really move the needle. Particularly in the absence of the county being the leader there, we're really looking for someone to step up.
KK: Yeah, let's talk about that, because New Hanover County has pulled out a lot of its funding for housing-related organizations, for homeless services. Can we talk about what the impact will be for some of that?
LC: Beyond the obvious non county agency funding, which is providing, you know, really essential operational and programmatic funds for boots on the ground organizations that are touching homeless services and housing and whatnot, the real and most significant loss in our world as housing advocates is the Workforce Housing Services Fund: that $3 million that could be granted directly to affordable housing developers, nonprofit affordable housing developers.
It's a real hit to the already kind of insubstantial lack of gap financing funds, pre-development funds, last mile funds, that gets folks in an increasingly challenging development market to be able to bring something online that, whether for renters or homeowners, is a truly affordable product and affordable for the long term. Those funds also had the teeth to make sure that, like other mechanisms that we see at the federal and state level, a project that was funded would be affordable for terms of 15, 20, 30 years, and of course, in the in the great county race to the bottom, that was one of the victims.
KK: Do you think that the endowment is likely to pick up some of that funding? Because I think that is a lot of the motivation at the county level for pulling out on so many of these services and these grants.
LC: Yeah, and, you know, huge kudos to the endowment — to use Ben's words, for catching the baby — right, and filling the gap in the non-county agency funding space. I think the question still remains to be answered for advocates, as far as what the endowment will be able to do to really match the ability to invest in, again, not projects that are not operated by nonprofits to create and preserve affordable housing. They don't legally have a mechanism to provide funds, to say, an affordable housing developer like Blue Ridge Atlantic development, they would have to have a nonprofit arm to be able to receive those funds.
KK: I'd love to talk to about the impact that the county pulling out in this space has on the city, because the city is one of the main funders of the Cape Fear Continuum of Care, for example. I know the city has been very involved in funding housing, and has often worked with the county to do gap financing, and that might be something they have to take on alone now. So, what do you expect this will do to the city?
LC: Yeah, you know, the tact that the county is taking is challenging for me to understand as a housing advocate. You know, the county seems to be reprioritizing their efforts around things like workforce development, and seniors, and school children.
There's a great person in the city that likes to say housing is where jobs go to sleep at night. Housing is also where seniors go to sleep at night, and school children go to get a good sleep at night, and the city really has committed to that. And so we're seeing a really encouraging and committed reinvestment from the city.
Their budget, their housing funds, were left untouched, which is really fantastic. And just last year, the city invested over $5 million into over 321 units. That's a mix of repairs, new construction, home ownership opportunities, rental opportunities, so they were actually investing more money in housing opportunities than the county's $3 million despite their very clear budget disparities. So the city is still very much on track to be a partner to the community, but certainly doesn't have the ability to provide the types of funds that come directly from taxpayers that the county does.
So the city, for example, is a pass-through for lots of federal funding. So while they're very committed to dispersing those funds to everyone from homeless services providers to rental rehabilitation programs, home ownership rehabilitation programs, it really remains to be seen with the federal budget still in limbo where things like CDBG, Community Development Block Grant funds,, HOME funds, where things like the housing state trust fund will will end up. So it's really, again, remains to be seen. But the truth is, the city is certainly left in the lurch by losing a partner in the county. A lot of times, it takes multiple collaborators, state offices, county, city, federal dollars, private dollars, to make anything truly affordable, again, in this very challenging and very expensive landscape.
KK: For example, I know that HUD is very much on the chopping block in a lot of ways with the Trump administration. You're saying that that could mean that the city has less money to go around, and would have to pull even more out of its usual budget, out of local taxpayers, in order to fund housing projects.
LC: Yeah, absolutely. So if the city doesn't have federal funds to disperse, then they're going to have to look and look creatively in their budget to figure out if that's something that they can fund internally. You know what the appetite is from taxpayers, but certainly for folks who think that there's no ramifications federally in our local housing space, it's just not the case.
KK: Let's talk a bit about the lay of the land for an individual seeking housing. What is it like for renters and homebuyers on the ground in New Hanover County?
LC: Something that we've been talking about a lot right now is our rising area median income, cresting over $100,000 for the first time in this community for a family of four. And I think maybe some people are interpreting that as, 'Wow, we're doing a great job raising wages and the economy and people here are really booming.' And that's really not the case.
Because what inbound and outbound migration data tells us, is that people who earn less are just leaving this community, either for other job opportunities, for housing opportunities, we are going to be hard won to get those folks back here. The other piece of what that data shows us is that people with higher incomes, whether they're working remotely or being drawn to our job market here, are moving in. So it is not a sign of success that we've done such a great job in raising the existing County's area median income, but that the number of people here that earn more is increasing, and they're not Wilmingtonians.
KK: So you're saying that the jobs that we have in the county, they haven't increased in wages. What's happening is that people are maybe moving here with remote work jobs, and they have the high wages, but the people who make that bottom tier who are working at Bojangles or something, they're still making the same amount of money, and it's just becoming less and less affordable.
LC: Absolutely.
KK: One of the one of the knock-on effects of this too, is that the AMI going up that much impacts what the rents are for LIHTC (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) projects. And I've gotten calls about this because of Starway leasing up right now, I've gotten calls from people saying, 'how can it be that they're charging over $1,000 for rent and calling it affordable?' And the answer to that is exactly this AMI thing you're talking about.
LC: Spot on, yeah, so those rents for federally funded affordable housing opportunities are often pegged to the HUD Home rent standards. So there is not a person sitting here in Wilmington calculating how much can I earn for this apartment. They're tying those units directly to area median income percentages. So the project that we talked about five years ago being affordable at X rate has now increased substantially because of our increasing area median income. So it's affecting people, not just on the ground, but also in more technical ways, in regards to these projects that we're advocating for.
KK: I want to ask you what the actual impact is of that for people who are at that bottom level and who are struggling to make ends meet. Have you got any data about that?
LC: So, a really interesting statistic that the Continuum of Care and other housing advocates have been discussing is the first-time rate of homelessness within the existing population here in Wilmington. So when they do the Point in Time Count every year, we are all familiar with trying to capture that really essential data to see who we're serving and what their needs are in Wilmington and the greater County and in the tri-County region [Brunswick, New Hanover, and Pender counties].
And the most shocking for me and for a lot of other people was that the vast majority of people who were experiencing homelessness in this area were doing so for the first time last year. So it tells me two things. It tells me, one, despite all odds and challenges, this community is actually doing a great job of addressing chronic homelessness. You have projects like The Sparrow coming online from Good Shepherd Center. You have Driftwood reopening, other projects that are expanding and taking on more clients and really looking at those like solutions-oriented housing opportunities for chronically homeless individuals.
But it also tells us that when 86% of the people experiencing homelessness are doing so for the first time, that means that folks who essentially have no right losing their housing or have no business falling into homeless services are doing so, and it's directly related to cost.
These are not moral failings. These are not folks that are actively struggling with addiction. These are not people who choose to be homeless. It's folks who just frankly, cannot afford to live here and are living in their cars and they're living in motels, and they're falling into services systems that are already completely overwhelmed by higher needs users, and are now trying to figure out how a working mom and dad and three kids living in their car are going to vie for an apartment in a community where you have to earn three times the rent to even get through the door. So it's really challenging.
KK: Well, thank you so much. Liz, I really appreciate you coming in today.
LC: Yeah, thanks for having me.
