Chapel Hill’s Planning Department will be putting together a new staff advisory board to brainstorm ideas for a revamped affordable housing strategy.
Council members endorsed the idea at a Monday evening work session at the Chapel Hill Library.
“Right now we’re doing a lot of conceptual thinking about this strategy and what we hope it can do,” said Rae Buckley, senior planner for the department’s Division of Housing and Neighborhood Services.
“We want to focus on developing a community understanding of what we mean when we talk about affordable housing.”
Planners have identified two issues that they believe will be critical for the new strategy to address: identifying the town’s preferences for types of affordable housing units and deciding how the town will support the maintenance needs of existing affordable housing.
“Historically, we’ve relied on the market to tell us what the needs are,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said. “If the market demanded construction of a certain number of condominiums, we have assumed that there is a corresponding demand for those units.”
The town is working with a consulting firm to complete a residential market study to provide data on which demographics are having their affordable housing needs met.
“I’d like to see who have we provided housing for in the past, versus who are our current residents,” Mayor Pro Tem Jim Ward said.
“Does that match up with who we think we’re serving?”
