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We call on the Raleigh City Council to support a Green New Deal for Housing Justice in order to eliminate racist and classist systems from our housing market, lower the cost of housing throughout the city, lower our city’s environmental footprint, and guarantee housing as a human right for all people in Raleigh.

Here are our demands:

  Eliminate Single-Family Zoning: Allow duplexes, triplexes, and quadruplexes in all residential land in Raleigh, allow multiple “tiny-homes” to be built on a single lot for multiple renters to co-live on.

  Allow More Dense Development Near Transit: Loosen height requirements near all Go Raleigh transit lines, eliminate mandatory parking minimums on all streets with Go Raleigh transit lines.

  Protect Neighborhoods from Rising Costs of Housing: Have the city create three community land trusts in Southeast Raleigh neighborhoods encompassing those that are being the most affected by gentrification, with democratic power for the residents of these neighborhoods, grant eminent domain power to community land trusts in Raleigh, set aside a portion of housing bond funds to give to community land trusts.

  Build Affordable Housing Throughout Raleigh: Make it an official policy of the city that every citizen in Raleigh must be guaranteed a home, require developers either set aside 20% of units for affordable housing or donate 5% of units to the city to be used as housing for homeless residents, spend the majority of funds from the housing bond building new, and improving old public housing throughout the city, make sure affordable housing is defined only as housing that makes up only 30% of a renter or buyer’s monthly income, double the property tax on all housing that has been unoccupied for more than three months and put the money raised towards affordable housing, create an occupancy tax on all unoccupied air-bnb units to discourage private investment in air-bnbs. Put funds towards affordable housing development.

  Protect Renters from Eviction During the Pandemic: Place a moratorium on all evictions until Wake county reaches a sufficient amount of cases, zero out all rent and mortgage payments during the pandemic for those unable to pay, ban utility and water shut offs during the pandemic.

  Environmental Programs and Regulations: Require all developers of non-affordable housing meet higher environmental regulations. Developers of affordable housing can qualify for assistance from the city in meeting environmental regulations.

Why is this important?

In light of the global movement to dismantle systemic racism, we believe that the city must do whatever it can to create a decent and just society for all its residents, most importantly poor, Black and Brown residents. The 2008 housing crisis caused a drastic increase in the racial wealth gap in this country, a gap that has only widened since. In 2017, while 8.4% of white people in Raleigh lived in poverty compared to 18.5% of Black residents. As housing continues to be American households' largest monthly expense, it comes with no surprise that study after study shows how rising costs of housing disproportionately affects poor, Black households. We can see this manifesting in Raleigh’s biggest issue in recent years, the rapid gentrification of Southeast Raleigh. With new wealthier residents moving into the historically Black neighborhoods of Southeast Raleigh, long-term residents are being priced out and forced to move to less expensive areas, farther out from the city-center. This is happening so fast that Raleigh has recently ranked among the top ten fastest-gentrifying cities. In Raleigh's South Park Neighborhood, White people were nearly absent in the year 2000, but by 2012 they made up 17% of the neighborhood. Since then, they’ve received nearly 9 in 10 of the new mortgages. Now, property values are so high that it’s nearly impossible for a poor, Black family to buy a home.

On top of all this, there are laws in our city’s ordinances that were specifically designed to segregate neighborhoods by race and income. In his book The Color of Law, author Richard Rothstein details how zoning ordinances were first used to keep black residents out of White neighborhoods and how when the supreme court outlawed these ordinances, "To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class Whites resided, local and federal officials began … to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford." Over half of the residential zoned land in our city is set aside for single-family zoning, which is the result of racist and classist segregation policies. While it is morally necessary that we eliminate these ordinances, it is also very practical in order to lower the rapidly increasing costs of housing in our city. With Raleigh ranking consistently as one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the US, we need to drastically increase our housing capacity to house all of the new residents moving to our city.

The impending global crisis of climate change is yet another issue we must address. The purpose of a Green New Deal is to provide a comprehensive solution to the climate crisis and many of the systemic issues that face our country, as well as centering front-line communities in the solutions we propose. Raleigh has made commendable strides towards addressing the climate crisis but, there is more that we can and should do. That is why we include a demand for stronger regulations on emissions for new housing developments as well as a program to retrofit public and private housing units with solar panels and a way for more housing to be built near transit lines. On top of this eliminating single-family zoning will by itself be positive for our cities environmental footprint by reducing the urban sprawl that our city has today.  

All of these issues must be addressed by City Council, and they can do so by passing the policies that we demand. We understand that these policies will not solve all of the housing issues the city faces, and it certainly will not solve systemic racism. This is why we also demand that city council also meet the demands of other movements fighting for justice in our city. Only then can we ensure housing justice, climate justice, and justice for Black and Brown lives in Raleigh.