The Town Council Takes a Swing and a Miss
Wednesday night's stalemate at Town Hall defies common sense
The Chapel Hill Town Council hit a surprising 4-4 stalemate on some critical updates to our land use manual Wednesday night. Here’s why that matters, and what we can do next.
Chapel Hill has three big challenges:
housing affordability
high quality placemaking
creating new revenue without changing taxes
Housing in Chapel Hill is more expensive than Alamance, Chatham, and Durham. We’re competing with those counties for adults between the ages of 22 and 65—and right now, we’re losing. Chapel Hill’s population growth is 75% in the 65+ age range. The only other category where we’re likely to grow much is in the 18-22 range, as UNC pursues Lee Roberts’ goal of adding 500 new students per year.
We need more homes that will appeal to adults. And we need to legalize purpose-built student housing, especially close to campus. If we don’t, we will force students and adults to compete for the same homes, driving prices up and exacerbating our demographic imbalance.
Even as we strive the keep the Town vital by restoring the freedom to create starter homes on smaller lots, we must also be laser-focused on creating revenue for the Town. Chapel Hill’s revenue grows naturally at a rate of 1% per year, while inflation over the same period has averaged 5%. That math leaves us with a choice: adopt land use rules that enable our revenue to grow faster, or don’t. Legalizing more of these smaller homes will help to do that.
If we don’t, then our choices are to raise taxes or cut services. If we can’t introduce new neighborhood homes to the market, we’ll be unable to slow the meteoric rise in property values which is making residents rich on paper but leaving them frustrated about their property taxes, even when Council votes to decrease the tax rate by a whopping 9 cents (as we did in 2025, when the tax rate dropped from 59 cents per $100 dollars to 50 cents per $100 dollars, a 15% cut).
On Wednesday night, we had an opportunity to make progress. Instead, the Council reached a 4-4 stalemate on a set of technical amendments that would have helped to create more starter homes and meet all three of these needs.
That doesn’t mean the reform opportunity is dead. Quite the opposite: we will consider these amendments again in January with a new council. At that time, I intend to bring additional amendments to legalize triplexes and quadplexes, which Council should have done in 2023 as originally intended. The LUMO is long overdue, and we cannot predict with confidence when it will be done.
Our need is urgent. Council must act. We need more homes, better placemaking, and more revenue.
I will bring amendments in January that reflect that urgency and provide another chance to take action. I hope that my colleagues will join me.
I really appreciate that you’re trying to get more housing and denser housing. The kind of college town Nimbyism that Chapel Hill and now Durham are increasingly suffering from is one of those things that looks progressive, but is actually incredibly regressive.
My understanding was that building new residential development is a net revenue loss for the town because of the cost of building the necessary infrastructure, and that while new housing developed in recent years may be affordable for some, but mostly we have high end rentals. While building on smaller lots, with already developed infrastructure may be revenue positve if zoning is revised to permit this, I do not see the potential for much new housing in these kinds of lots. How many families might be served? It seems to me that some progress could be made with innovative programs like tiny houses, but this and other innovative affordable housing efforts will require significant public subsidies. Over the years, it is my impression that a succession of Town Councils have failed to tax developers according to their own regulations contributing to our current dilemma. Please correct me if I am wrong in this thinking.