Durham just doesn’t get it. It messes and fiddles and screws around with things until nothing resembles what happens in a saner world outside the confines of the Durham city limits.
Take the misguided effort to push “affordable housing.” The city has put liens on several properties that had to be demolished at city expense because landlords wouldn’t maintain them. OK. Sometimes these things need to be done. Sometimes landlords are irresponsible.
Now the Durham City Council has passed an ordinance that allows forgiving those liens with the proviso that the city require “affordable housing” to be built on the properties. Other groups have demanded that “affordability covenants” be placed on the properties from the start.
So, what is affordable housing, anyway. It’s as squishy a concept as “sustainability.” Activists seem to understand it but people in the real world find the terms as hard to grasp as mercury. In reality, “affordable housing” is a) housing in a transitional neighborhood that not many people want to live in, or b) new, poorly built homes that are affordable because they’re cheap houses on cheap land. The latter is what’s being advocated for these lien properties.
These are homes that often don’t survive their mortgage term. One of the big pushers of this policy is Habitat for Humanity. Bless their hearts, their intentions are/were good, but the houses they build do not stand the test of time. Just check out any Habitat “development” 10 years after it’s built.
If you mandate that housing should be “affordable,” and that only low-income people can live in them, and establish what amounts to rent control, you’re not building affordable housing, you’re building a future slum no better than what was demolished in the first place. The city needs to get out of the way and let people who know what they’re doing, who understand markets, supply and demand, do the job.
If they don’t, we’ll have a city full of Rolling Hills catastrophes.
