Affordable Housing

Charlotte and Mecklenburg County are still facing a large gap between the supply of affordable housing and the number of residents who need it, as inreasing rents and a tight housing market are squeezing more families’ budgets and putting them at risk of housing instability, evicion and homelessness. Those are some of the key findings […]

A new program designed to identify solutions for some of the pressing needs and issues facing the greater Charlotte region is getting underway this fall at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. For the first time, the Institute has named a cohort of Faculty Fellows to conduct research projects and work alongside local stakeholders to understand […]

With Charlotte’s population growing by dozens of people a day, planners, politicians and many residents agree that denser development is inevitable in the city’s future. But just how dense – and exactly where to build that extra density – remain thorny questions, especially when denser developments are proposed in single-family neighborhoods. The tension between wanting […]

Charlotte saw a boom of low-cost, single-family subdivisions from the late 1990s until a recession hit in 2007. In a new research article, two scholars conclude that many of those subdivisions, touted as “affordable housing,” did not improve life for the lower-income households who moved in. They characterize the unfortunate outcomes of some of those […]

In recent years there has been a trend (unfortunate, in my view) among a number of housing professionals and political officials to use the term “affordable housing” only in the context of lower-cost, assisted or subsidized housing. In fact, these three terms that describe housing have grown somewhat out of favor and have been conveniently, […]

In recent years there has been a trend (unfortunate, in my view) among a number of housing professionals and political officials to use the term “affordable housing” only in the context of lower-cost, assisted or subsidized housing. In fact, these three terms that describe housing have grown somewhat out of favor and have been conveniently, […]

For workers in Mecklenburg County, it has become even harder to afford housing, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s latest Out of Reach report. The 2016 report documents the gap between wages and fair market rents (for standard-quality rental units) in communities across the United States.[i] The fair market rent takes into account […]

For many decades, the complex and difficult challenges of housing low-income Charlotteans have been the source of local studies, public debate, public policy formation and a variety of actions. This short paper is intended to trace the evolution of the challenges in Charlotte and the responses to them, with an eye toward the future for […]

I’ve been in and around the housing field for a long time, and I’ve seen mountains of housing statistics, data and quantitative analysis, everything from vacancy rates to under-construction tallies to eviction research. Often all these numbers, while important, get lost because they are just too voluminous and multifaceted to really comprehend. The average person, […]

What are the characteristics of Mecklenburg County’s homeless population and how has it changed over time? To try to answer those questions, Mecklenburg County each year performs the Point in Time (PIT) Count, a federally mandated act to determine the prevalence and characteristics of homeless people in the United States. The PIT Count helps communities […]