National housing expert: U.S. must build its way out of housing crisis

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New housing near the former Heritage Square Shopping Center in Durham. (Photo: By Greg Childress/NC Newsline)

The U.S. hasn’t kept pace with housing demands and has a shortage of more than 4 million homes, Jenny Schuetz, an affordable housing expert, said Tuesday during the N.C. Affordable Housing Conference in Raleigh.

Schuetz, vice president of infrastructure and housing at Houston-based Arnold Ventures, was the keynote speaker at the event, which was attended by more than 1,500 affordable housing advocates, developers, policymakers and others. She leads the organization’s efforts to find evidence-based solutions to address critical housing issues.

“We haven’t been building enough homes to keep up with demand created by population growth and job growth for more than 15 years now,” Schuetz said. “Going back to the great financial crisis, we just stopped building housing altogether for about four or five years. It took a long time for industry to start digging itself out of a hole.”

Arnold Ventures is a philanthropic organization that focuses on evidence-based solutions to problems in the criminal justice system, education, health and public finance. It was founded by billionaire John Arnold and his wife Laura.

Schuetz is author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System, which assess how local state and national housing policies affect people and communities.

The housing shortage, Schuetz said, is more acute in areas with the best job markets, productive companies and great public schools.

“The Research Triangle area has a lot really well-paid jobs and a lot of great opportunities for people,” Schuetz said. “Places like coastal California, D.C. [District of Columbia], where I live, New York, Boston — many or those areas haven’t been building enough homes for 30 or 40 years, so we’ve got a lot of building to do to dig ourselves out of a hole.”

The top states for the housing shortage are large one like California and Texas, but North Carolina and others also have not built enough housing to keep up with demand, Schuetz said.

A recent study commissioned by the NC Chamber Foundation in partnership with the North Carolina Home Builders Association and NC REALTORS® found that the state needs 760,000 new housing units over the next five years to meet demand across its 100 counties.

Schuetz believes fixing the nation’s housing crisis will require bold policy changes from local, state and federal governments. She said states and local governments have adopted “a whole lot of rules that may be coming from a good place” but make it tougher for developers to build housing.

Schuetz supports revisions to zoning laws to allow more diverse housing types such as accessory dwellings, townhouses, duplexes and apartments. The rezoning process for rental housing also needs to be shorter, simpler and more transparent to help low- to moderate-income households, she said.

It’s also much harder to build starter homes for first-time homeowners, she said. “Part of the problem we have now is that the people who would have been homeowners probably 20 years ago are still in the rental market.”

Schuetz would like to see zoning reforms to encourage the building of more row houses, popular in cities such as the District of Columbia, Baltimore and Philadelphia, rather than the single-family detached homes that tend to dominate zoning in many areas.

She noted that existing homeowners are a formidable force when they go before local governments to protest development proposals, often complaining that projects are too big, out of scale and will put enrollment pressures on school districts.

“This is worse actually in a lot of communities that think of themselves as progressive, care about diversity but they really don’t want diversity in their own neighborhood,” she said.

Schuetz said she gave a talk in Chapel Hill last year where she heard Habitat for Humanity fought residents who professed to care about affordable housing for 15 years to get a project approved to provide such housing.

She said there has been a shift over the last several years with many more people showing up at local government meetings to support affordable housing and apartment complexes.

Schuetz advised developers to avoid “grand general statements” when trying to win over existing homeowners anxious about new projects and policy reforms. She said the quickest way to shut down a conversation about policy reform is to walk into a room and declare an end to single-family homes.

“Stay away from scary terms,” Schuetz said. “We want to talk about things in a way that is positive so we can make it easier to build homes of all shapes and sizes.”

Nate Blanton, a former Democratic candidate for the NC House, organized a successful fight against a large housing project in Garner, contending such developments can diminish the quality of life for existing residents. Blanton did not win the House race.

Blanton said the development of 300 single-family homes, 500 multi-family residential units and commerce space was not right for the area. It was too big and would have a negative impact on traffic, he said.

“We got the outcome we desired and the development was stopped,” Blanton said. “That’s virtually unheard of in North Carolina.”

Blanton acknowledged that some neighbors opposed the development because the mostly white community of homeowners didn’t want to see renters move nearby.

“When you say affordable housing, I can tell you what pops up in a lot of people’s minds,” Blanton said, acknowledging a legacy of racism that fuels distrust among some whites.      

Scott Farmer, executive director of the N.C. Housing Finance Agency, said state and federal funding is essential to increase the state’s housing supply. But removing barriers through regulatory reforms would also help developers to quickly add more homes, he said.

“A lot of that has to do with local governments and some of their staffing capacities as well, which we recognize, but the biggest hurdle is financing and regulatory reform to speed up the construction process,” Farmer said.

The two-day conference concluded Thursday. It is sponsored by the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency, the North Carolina Housing Coalition and Centrant Community Capital.