Costs limit living choices

Truphenia Kelley's kids are sick and tired of Hamburger Helper.

But what their mother knows is that the inexpensive dinner solution is one way families can stretch their income to qualify for a subsidized home.

This type of cost-cutting is a way of life for many Chapel Hill workers, for whom the cost of housing in the town is just out of reach.

And with little developable land within the growth boundary remaining, home prices continue to soar.

Today in Chapel Hill, prospective homeowners are likely to spend up to $400,000 for a new single-family home.

Affordable housing advocates such as Susan Levy, executive director of Orange County Habitat for Humanity, say these prices make it difficult for even households of modest means to find reasonable housing.

"There is need (for affordable housing) across the board," she said.

Levy said Habitat works with a wide range of families -- from teachers and health-service employees to those who, because of disability, have as little as $175 a month to spend on housing.

Kelley, a dental hygienist at the UNC School of Dentistry, earns more than $40,000 a year. But without subsidized housing, home ownership might well have been out of her reach.

A 34-year-old single mother of three, Kelley said she struggled for years to keep up with bills after making rent payments.

"It was a huge amount of my income," Kelley said. "I barely had anything left afterwards."

Jeff Caiola, co-director of EmPOWERment Inc., a nonprofit affordable housing provider, said the problem is that wages trail area housing costs, especially in the service sector, where wages have stagnated.

Since 1979, real wages for workers in the bottom fifth of the wage scale have increased by only 88 cents an hour, according to the N.C. Justice Center.

"I think about people who make $8 an hour," Kelley said. "How do you survive on $8 an hour with a family? Better find Jesus, I guess. If they don't know him, they better know him now."

One of the most popular survival strategies is commuting.

Based on the 2004 Chapel Hill Databook, only 30 percent of town employees last year had Chapel Hill zip codes, creating a contingent of commuters from the county, where demand is lower and construction cheaper.

University employees, at 40 percent, are only slightly more likely to have town zip codes.

The number of commuters has caught the attention of officials such as Robert Dowling, executive director of the Orange County Housing and Land Trust, who says the area must find a way to house an increasing number of low-income workers.

"You don't want people driving in from places like Mebane because that causes pollution," he said.

While the town's effort to require new developments to include affordable housing has created more options, working families still have to compete for a limited number of affordable-housing opportunities.

Habitat accepted only 15 of 75 applications last year, turning away many qualified families, Levy said.

The lack of cheap, buildable land within town limits makes the task of providing affordable housing more difficult for both nonprofits like Habitat and developers.

"Land is so expensive that a developer can't justify putting less-expensive houses on the lot," Caiola said.

Levy said finding good, cheap lots in town is nearly impossible.

One lot Habitat did secure was a 17-acre site near Ginger Road, just south of Interstate 40, where they have proposed a 50-unit development called Sunrise Road.

But the development has met resistance from nearby residents, who say the project's density will not fit with the existing environment.

This is because, unlike the Habitat project, which will include several multifamily buildings tightly clustered around an area of open space, neighboring subdivisions such as Chandler's Green are composed of exclusively single-family homes on spacious lots.

"We are in an area where people are living on two to three acres of land, and someone is coming in and changing it and saying, 'Why don't you like that?'" said Doug Schworer, president of the Sunrise Coalition.

The coalition, established in 2003 in response to the project, has petitioned for a development of about 20 to 25 single-family units.

Doug Bibby, president of the National Multi Housing Council, said that as a result of failed public housing projects like Chicago's Cabrini Green, which was plagued by drugs and concentrated poverty before it was demolished, many people harbor negative stereotypes about dense affordable housing.

"When they block those, the alternative is to push the development out, putting people farther away from jobs," Bibby said. "You have a choice. There are consequences for that that aren't always good for the greater community."

But for Kelley, sitting in her newly refurbished 1930s home, the future is hopeful.

"The best part of this experience is that I can tell people, especially single parents, that if I can do this, you can, too."

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