Storyline · 1986–1992
In 1986 a citizens' task force told Chapel Hill that moderate-income housing could be built at no cost to taxpayers. The town's Tandler project on Legion and Merritt Mill roads, approved in 1987, sold small houses with deferred town second mortgages, made Chapel Hill a federal demonstration city, and by 1989 housed 26 families. Chapel Hill joined a Triangle housing fund, Carrboro formed its own task force, and in 1991 the county created the Orange Community Housing Corporation. In 1992 the town sped review of the corporation's 20 Asheton Hill houses on Erwin Road but delayed the $200,000 it sought for its Erwin Village homes.
Two residents started an Affordable Housing Task Force after a 1985 public-private partnership conference in Lexington, Kentucky, and by January 1986 it was telling the Chapel Hill Town Council that moderate-income housing could be built at no cost to taxpayers. Its members included Carrboro Mayor James Porto, planning professor Michael Stegman and Vice Chancellor Farris Womack. By November the council was studying three bids to build 26 to 33 low-cost houses on town land at Merritt Mill Road and Grant Street and on Legion Road.
On February 2, 1987 the council set guidelines for the project, aimed at households earning 60 percent or less of the town's median income of $30,400, with preference for first-time buyers and families who had lived and worked in Chapel Hill for a year and a town option to buy a house back on resale. On July 13, six weeks after the plan was submitted, the council approved the Tandler subdivision, built by the town with Capricorn Isler Inc.: homes of 900 to 1,250 square feet to sell for $50,000 to $60,000, each carrying a deferred town second mortgage of $20,000 to $25,000 repaid only on resale. A town planner called the speed "next to a miracle," and by September the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had named Chapel Hill one of 40 demonstration cities in its Joint Venture for Affordable Housing because of the project. That month Orange County's Low- and Moderate-Income Housing Task Force, chaired by Lightning Brown, reported that 513 homes in the county had no indoor bathroom and, among ten recommendations, called for a nonprofit housing corporation.
By early December three Tandler houses off Legion and Merritt Mill roads were nearly finished; the builder was to put up 34 for families earning $18,000 to $26,000, and 22 were already reserved, with priority for town and University employees. By March 1, 1988 one house was occupied, but Town Manager David Taylor reported that soil, sewer and terrain problems at the Merritt Mill Road site could raise public improvement costs from $380,000 to about $605,000, and the council postponed a vote on cutting the project to as few as 25 houses. It then added money left from the half-cent sales tax so that every lot could be built, and by April 18 the project had 17 sales contracts signed.
On March 14, 1988 the council approved $2,200 as Chapel Hill's share of hiring a consultant for a low-income housing loan fund planned with Raleigh and Durham. On October 11 Mayors Jonathan Howes of Chapel Hill, Avery Upchurch of Raleigh and Wib Gulley of Durham announced the Triangle Housing Partnership, a private nonprofit and the renamed Triangle Housing Investment Fund formed in March, to raise private money for affordable housing across the Triangle. In January 1989 Carrboro's aldermen formed a housing task force of Hilliard Caldwell, Frances Shetley and Judith Wegner; Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird called Carrboro the center of the area's low-to-moderate income housing.
By February 1989 the Chapel Hill council had given high priority to a private group's plan for 50 small houses on 25 acres on Culbreth School Road; the group asked for a town subsidy of $25,000 a house and offered to give the land to the town to lease back to owners at $1 a year so the houses would stay affordable. By late October housing director Tina Vaughn reported that 26 families had moved into the Tandler houses, and council member Julie Andresen called the pilot a success as the Culbreth Park Community Development Corporation planned 52 more small homes on Culbreth School Road. On December 22, 1989 the state awarded Orange County a $2.25 million Small Cities Community Development Block Grant for the Culbreth Park Affordable Housing Project, which the Daily Tar Heel described as the first Interim Assistance award under the program; the project's founder said the money would let buyers take low-rate deferred second mortgages, saving five to six thousand dollars a house. In 1991 the county's Affordable Housing Task Force created the Orange Community Housing Corporation, which later became the Community Home Trust.
On October 29, 1991, at the end of its three-day annual meeting in Chapel Hill, the Public Private Partnership, formed in 1985 to study comparable college towns and led by Mayor Jonathan Howes as its president, decided to coordinate lenders, developers and housing advocates to provide affordable housing, after panels heard that many University employees could not afford homes in southern Orange County. On February 24, 1992 the Town Council unanimously agreed to speed review of the Orange Community Housing Corporation's plan for 20 affordable single-family houses at Asheton Hill on Erwin Road, an eight-acre site earmarked in 1983 for 91 condominiums of which only 16 were built. The town also offered staff help and waived application and building permit fees for the houses, meant for families earning less than $34,940, 80 percent of the local median income. On November 23 the council delayed the corporation's request for $200,000 toward Erwin Village, 20 detached homes for families earning $24,000 to $32,000, after earlier committing $60,000; council member Mark Chilton said the delay could derail the project, while Mayor Ken Broun said the request had grown from short-term to long-term money.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, the decades before and after the Civil War, tracing family ties and neighborhood networks through the county's records. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1987, 251 pages with illustrations, maps, portraits and a bibliography. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods and social conditions in the county in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1988), Journal of American History (1988), The American Historical Review (1989), The Journal of Southern History (1989), Civil War history (1989), Journal of Social History (1989).
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Neighborhood history of the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek area of Chapel Hill, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2020. The project started in June 2014 when neighbors were asked over the community email list to share memories of life there, and replies came from current residents and from former residents raised there who had since scattered across the country. 268 pages with illustrations, color maps and portraits.
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Robert E. Seymour, a Baptist pastor in Chapel Hill associated with Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, looks back on segregation and race relations in the South from the pulpit. A clergyman's memoir covering church history in the town, Baptists in North Carolina and the segregation of African Americans. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2011, 204 pages.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
Sara Regan Lachenman's 2005 thesis on how the people living in Carrboro's company built housing altered it to suit themselves. It takes up domestic architecture, working class housing and the social side of the textile industry in the town, with 158 pages of text and illustrations.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of family, kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, covering the county's households from the late antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Completed in 1982 in 248 leaves with maps. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods, race relations and social conditions in the county during the nineteenth century.
Public relations material on the Orange County Commission for Women, 1989 to 1992, from the files of the North Carolina Council on the Status of Women, 26 images, with Judith M. Messenheimer named as creator. Issues include child care, teenage pregnancy, abortion, older women, low-income housing, taxation, AFDC, and women's education and employment.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Material on the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek neighborhood of Chapel Hill, 2003 to 2019, gathered from residents and the neighborhood association while The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020) was being prepared. Three boxes, collection CHHS.017.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Affordable homeownership in Chapel Hill and Orange County, 1986–1992.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/affordable-homeownership-storyline-1986/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
