Named event or history
Public housing, the community land trust, and the campaigns to keep long-time residents in place.
17 indexed records are connected with this event.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
C.073.90045. 1842-1868
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 23, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 23 in the chronology →
Chapel Hill's first public housing neighborhoods were Craig-Gomains (40 units) and Lindsay Street (9 units), both built in 1967. Both remain in the town's 296-unit, 12-neighborhood public housing portfolio.
North Columbia Street (1968), South Estes Drive (1970), and Airport Gardens, Rainbow Heights and South Roberson Street (all 1972) extended the town's public housing after the first two 1967 sites.
When Northside and Pine Knolls were targeted for urban renewal, residents confronted HUD and avoided the wholesale clearance seen in Durham's Hayti, winning home improvements and new construction instead.
After a rent strike and other problems in the 1980s, the town council took over public housing from a separate housing authority and ran it as a town department. Chapel Hill and Shelby are the only North Carolina municipalities with that structure.
Between 1980 and 2010 Northside's Black population fell by roughly 40 percent as investors bought homes and converted or replaced them as student rentals; over the same period the share of university workers living 10 or more miles away rose above 60 percent.
The county's Affordable Housing Task Force created the Orange Community Housing Corporation, the organization that later became the Community Home Trust.
Local activists and governments incorporated the Community Land Trust in Orange County to keep homes permanently affordable through ground leases.
The first land trust home was sold in June 2000 in Carrboro. By then the organization had helped create nearly 100 affordable housing opportunities in Chapel Hill.
The Community Land Trust in Orange County merged with the Orange Community Housing Corporation under the name Orange Community Housing and Land Trust. It reached 100 homes in 2005 and 230 by 2014.
After residents asked for protection from student-rental conversions, the council enacted the town's first neighborhood conservation district, a zoning overlay limiting house size and height in Northside. An advisory committee drafted it through 2003 before a January 21, 2004 public hearing.
The council voted 9-0 to adopt Ordinance O-7 creating the Pine Knolls district, which bans new duplexes, caps floor area at 2,500 square feet and reduces front-yard parking. The Greenwood and Kings Mill/Morgan Creek districts were adopted the same night.
Rev. Troy Harrison and UNC professor Della Pollock began collecting oral histories in Northside, the project that grew into the Marian Cheek Jackson Center.
Section 15-182.4 of Carrboro's Land Use Ordinance sets a goal that at least 15 percent of units in new residential developments be affordable and offers density bonuses or payments in lieu to meet it. The section was rewritten on June 26, 2007.
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History held its ribbon cutting on the second floor of the H.W. Baldwin Fellowship Hall at St. Joseph C.M.E. Church. It is named for Marian Cheek Jackson, the church historian and lifelong Pine Knolls resident.
The Town Council unanimously passed an ordinance requiring for-sale developments of five or more units to make 10 to 15 percent of them affordable to households earning 65 to 80 percent of area median income, or to give land, housing or cash in lieu. It took effect in 2011 and does not cover rental projects.
The council voted 7-0 for a six-month development moratorium in Northside and Pine Knolls, backdated to May 23, 2011, while a community plan was drafted. Jackson Center staff helped organize residents in support.
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