Which costs more?
If you guessed the flat in Hillsborough, you're wrong, a fact UNC employee Yvette Harris learned first hand when she began searching for housing in the area last summer.
A cashier at Lenoir Dining Hall since July, Harris and her husband first looked into renting a place in Chapel Hill but quickly found the high prices to be a rude awakening.
"My husband makes good money, but I make $7 an hour and we have four kids," Harris said. "To pay the rent and take care of them is hard. You can live in Chapel Hill and Carrboro if you're rich -- or if you don't want to live in a good, nice, clean area because that's all that you can afford there."
The couple ended up renting a trailer home in Hillsborough, and Harris takes a 30-minute bus ride to work.
Stories like the Harrises' aren't uncommon in Chapel Hill, where increasingly high housing prices have forced most UNC employees and faculty to live outside the town's borders.
As a condition of the sale, 25 percent of the single-family homes and townhouses that Winmore builds on the land will be priced at $175,000 or less. It's a price that Bob Knight, assistant vice chancellor for finance and administration, said is well below the median home price in the Chapel Hill area.
Of those homes, 75 percent are reserved for UNC and Carrboro employees.
As another term of the sale, Winmore also will build 96 apartments and then give back to the University the land the apartments rest on so UNC can ensure that they remain affordable for employees in the future.
The rent for the apartments has yet to be determined, but Knight said that renters would not pay more than 30 percent of their incomes.
The construction plans have yet to be approved by Carrboro officials, and Knight said that the sale of the Horace Williams tract will not be finalized until that happens.
"We're waiting for the next step," he said. "But if everything goes well, building could start next spring."
Ninety-six apartments and more houses might not seem like a lot considering the thousands of people UNC employs, but UNC Employee Forum Chairman Tommy Griffin said Winmore is an important first step toward offering affordable housing in an area known for anything but.
"The average salary of a UNC employee is $32,000," Griffin said. "And at $32,000, there's not much you can purchase in Chapel Hill, where the average cost of a house is $375,000."
Finding affordable housing in the area is a little easier for faculty members but still poses a problem, said Sue Estroff, chairwoman of the Faculty Council.
Estroff said she doesn't think a lack of affordable housing is discouraging faculty from coming to UNC but added that because of increases in the cost of living, many senior faculty members who do reside in town now could not afford do so if they were just coming in as junior professors.
Status at the University -- and the resulting salary difference -- is just one of the factors that determines how challenging the search for local housing is.
Journalism Professor Carol Pardun lives 2 1/2 miles from campus and said she found the search for housing relatively easy when she moved to the area with her family 5 1/2 years ago.
"It wasn't difficult at all; we got a real estate agent and found a very nice house," Pardun said. "But housing is very expensive, and I think a single-income family would have a much harder time."
That was the case for first-year Professor Sandra Campo, who resides in a townhouse in Durham but hopes to eventually move closer to UNC.
"I knew it was expensive, so the plan was to get a less expensive place so I can move into a house in Chapel Hill later," Campo said.
But even those staff and faculty members who can afford to live within Chapel Hill's borders said they often find that the cost is more than just monetary.
"Everyone I know is working at some sort of compromise to live close by," said John Oberlin, executive director for Academic Technology and Networks, who lived in an apartment in Chapel Hill for two years before moving into a house 10 years ago.
"It puts more pressure on both spouses to work, and there are certainly people who sacrifice other aspects of their lives, whether it be cars or travel. Chapel Hill is a great town, but the price of living here is very high."
But that high price of living also can be a matter of perspective, according to faculty members coming from other areas of the country.
First-year Professor Jodi Magness found the search for affordable housing fairly easy after coming from a teaching position at Tufts University outside of Boston, one of the toughest housing markets in the nation.
"It wasn't bad for us coming from Boston," Magness said. "I realize that this isn't the most inexpensive area to live in, but it's all relative. I wouldn't want to look for housing in Berkeley."
In fact, the lack of affordable housing in Berkeley and other areas in California prompted University of California-Berkeley and Irvine to begin building housing for junior faculty members.
"We're nowhere near that," Estroff said. "But I think we're getting to the point where favorable mortgage rates and lending practices with banks for faculty would be a good idea."
While such ideas have yet to be discussed formally, Griffin said Winmore is just the first attempt by the University to aid employees and faculty in finding affordable housing.
"(Winmore) will give some folks a chance to buy an apartment who otherwise probably couldn't afford it," Griffin said. "It's a starting point."
And Knight strongly echoed the sentiment of Griffin.
"Winmore is the only thing UNC has going on right now, but we are gathering information about what other universities do and what would work for us," he said. "We are going to look into other ways of helping people find affordable housing closer to Chapel Hill."
The Features Editor can be reached at features.unc.edu.
