County makes progress toward affordability goals

In 2019, Samantha Justice was a homeowner with a steady job. By the summer of 2021, she and her four children were living in a hotel room. A series of unfortunate events triggered by COVID-19-related shutdowns had turned their lives upside down, and she didn’t know when or where she’d be able to find stable housing.

Justice had sold her home right before the pandemic hit, but she couldn’t find a new one to buy. Then she lost her job at A-B Tech and was eventually forced out of the house she’d been renting when its owners couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments on all of their properties and needed to move into Justice’s rental themselves. Despite putting in long shifts as a medical assistant at an urgent care clinic and working early mornings at Sam’s Club, her savings were sapped. “It was absolutely devastating,” Justice says about the crisis that played out over less than two years.

She and her kids spent three months in that hotel room before being accepted for a two-bedroom unit at the Jasper Apartments, an affordable housing complex in Swannanoa. Built in 2022, it targets residents who make up to 60% of the area’s median income. Today, Justice has her job back at A-B Tech and, thanks in part to Jasper’s income-based rent control, is back on her feet financially.

“I just did not realize how bad housing would get after 2020,” she reflects.

Justice’s story has become increasingly common around Buncombe County over the last decade. Amid a housing crisis that has seen costs continue to skyrocket as supply can’t keep up with the rising demand, many families are just one bad break away from becoming homeless.

In November 2020, the Dogwood Health Trust commissioned Bowen National Research to conduct a housing needs assessment covering 18 Western North Carolina counties. As of 2020, the resulting report found, there were more than 2,200 Buncombe County households on waiting lists for below-market-rate rental housing. Of the more than 15,000 multifamily rental units surveyed, only 175 were vacant — and not all of those would qualify as affordable housing. To close the gap, the assessment concluded, the county needed more than 5,400 additional rental units reserved for households with incomes of up to 120% of the area median (which was $56,092 in 2020, according to the report).

Brownie Newman, chairman of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, says the housing situation is the community’s single biggest economic challenge. And after voters approved $30 million in general obligation bonds in 2022 to address the crisis, the county set some ambitious goals: Build 1,850 rental units for households making up to 80% of the area median income, including at least 200 units for households making up to 30% of the AMI. This fiscal year, which began July 1, will see the first allocation of those bond funds, supporting the county’s biggest investment yet in affordable housing. And for the first time in years, the commissioners are sounding an optimistic note.

At their June 18 meeting, Newman — who’s lived in the area since the early 1990s and has served on the board since 2012 — said, “The whole time I’ve been here, this is one of these issues where it seems like it just gets worse and worse every year. … I think we are now recognizing that we have strategies that can really work, that that doesn’t have to be the case.”

Bang for your buck

In 2019, the county established the Affordable Housing Committee, and after looking into what other local governments around the state were doing to address their shortages, committee members opted to follow the same playbook.

The strategy revolves around the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, established in 1986 as a way to encourage investors to support affordable housing developments. In return for offering tenants affordable rents, typically for a period of 30 years, developers can sell tax credits generated through the program. In North Carolina alone, more than 109,000 affordable units were built or renovated between 1987 and 2022 using the credits, making this one of the biggest and strongest financing tools for creating and rehabilitating affordable homes in the state, according to the N.C. Housing Finance Agency.

The program has two tiers offering different percentages of the qualified project cost (not including land acquisition). Buncombe had already been using the 9% program, which works out to about a 70% subsidy, to create one 50- to 70-unit project per year, but that didn’t put a dent in the county’s housing shortfall. In addition, the quest for those credits is highly competitive, “with one award for every three or four applications,” the agency’s website notes.

The state agency also offers an unlimited number of 4% credits, which provide a roughly 30% subsidy. But they require more local funding to make them financially viable for developers, and until the 2022 bond referendum, there wasn’t enough money available to create a significant number of such projects. Although the county’s annual investment in affordable housing jumped from about $300,000 starting in 2004 to $2.3 million over the last five years, that still fell far short of what was needed to support the 4% credits.

But with the 688 new affordable rental units the county has committed to adding this year, it’s already almost 60% of the way to the goal of 1,850 and will exceed the 200 units for households making up to 30% of AMI just two years into the program.

“If the county had just invested the bond funds without having a very focused strategy on supporting 4% LIHTC strategies, we could have easily committed the $30 million of the bond funds and have a much smaller number of new units to show for it,” Newman points out.

House and home

The insufficient number of affordable rental units is only part of the problem, however: Low-income homebuyers also need help.

For seven years, Danyelle Angel and her family lived in income-based rental housing while unsuccessfully trying to buy a home. She spent a lot of time at food banks and crisis centers trying to come up with enough food for their four children while her husband, Logan Angel, worked at the Charles George Veterans Affairs Medical Center, she says. If they started making a little more money, they lost their food stamps, which meant spending even more time finding help with food and other bills. And when they were able to save some money, it was never enough. “You can’t get ahead a penny, and every penny you make feels like they’re just taking it. It’s a really awful cycle of being stuck,” Danyelle explains.

Finally, in 2020, they obtained an interest-free, fixed-rate mortgage through Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity. And once they were established in their new house, the family was able to achieve some upward mobility.

“There’s a lot of mental stress that comes by and with poverty that you don’t realize it’s there until you are no longer in it,” she says.

Danyelle is now a community health worker with Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, where she helps people who are in a position similar to hers get connected to the resources they need.

The Angels’ newfound independence has enabled the family to more than double its income over the last several years, and they may soon be above the poverty line, which Danyelle says seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. Owning a house also boosted their credit rating, allowing them to buy a car that doesn’t constantly need repairs.

“I really feel like this program is what got us out of poverty,” she says. “Paying for us to stay in those apartments was doing nothing besides keeping us in those apartments and keeping us in poverty.”

A home one owns

Local officials say they’d like to replicate the Angels’ success story, but for several reasons, creating homes that lower-income people can afford to buy is a lot harder than encouraging affordable rental developments, says Matt Cable, Buncombe County’s community development division manager.

First off, there is no comparable tax credit program for homeownership. Additionally, even when alternative funding is available, those projects tend to be undertaken by smaller local nonprofits such as Habitat or Mountain Housing Opportunities, rather than regional and national companies that can use federal tax credits to make projects viable, Cable explains. And finally, the rising cost of Buncombe County’s limited available land is a barrier for any developer.

Not surprisingly, then, the county is a lot further from achieving its goal of creating 400 units by 2030 that people at or below the area median income can afford to buy. With just nine such units being built this fiscal year, another 276 are still needed.

For many county residents, the dream of homeownership is increasingly out of reach, creating a desperate situation, notes Geoffrey Barton, president and CEO of Mountain Housing Opportunities. He’s particularly excited about the nonprofit’s Spring Garden development in Candler. This year, partner families are working together to build a second set of six homes there, financed through a U.S. Department of Agriculture low-interest loan program, he says. The first six homes were completed in spring 2023.

At the same time, Barton and Cable both stress the importance of maintaining the existing affordable housing stock. Some longtime area residents are struggling to keep their homes in a livable condition, and if they had to sell them in their current state, they wouldn’t have enough money to buy elsewhere.

Mountain Housing Opportunities is slated to complete 200 home repairs this year, notes Barton, which is double what it did five years ago. Meanwhile, once the county helps fund emergency repairs for the 161 homes it has scheduled this fiscal year, it will have surpassed its goal of doing 500 such interventions by 2030.

Commissioner Parker Sloan says the county should be spending even more on emergency repairs, which he calls “a really cheap way to maintain our housing stock and keep people in their homes.” He says he’s working on tracking down more funding to expand the program.

If you build it …

Despite the undeniable progress, the local leaders Xpress spoke with for this story all acknowledge that there’s more to do. “When we’re talking about affordable housing in Buncombe County, good progress and a scale of hundreds of units is still woefully insufficient when the need is thousands of units,” notes Barton.

But thanks to the tax credit programs, voters’ approval of the bond money and an increased focus on maintaining existing housing stock, many feel that the county may be close to getting ahead of the curve.

“My hope is that the city and county will commit to a sustained program of building 4% LIHTC projects over the next 10 years, with enough local funding that we can have a sustained development of around 300 new affordable units built every year,” says Newman. “If we do this, we can truly turn the corner on the housing affordability issue over the coming years. This would likely require the city and county to both take bond referendums to the voters every two to four years.”

For his part, Sloan says he would support additional bond referendums. But Commissioner Amanda Edwards says she wants to ensure that the county has tangible success to show voters before seeking another referendum in 2026. She’s also focused on extending water and sewer infrastructure to more rural parts of the county, where people typically rely on wells and septic tanks, in hopes of encouraging developers to build more homes in those areas. That, she says, would increase the overall housing stock and perhaps help bring prices down.

In addition, the county is in the early stages of establishing developments with an affordable housing component on county-owned land on Ferry Road in South Asheville and on Coxe Avenue downtown. Those projects aren’t far enough along yet to be counted toward the county’s overall goals, but Newman, Sloan and Edwards all say they’re excited about their potential.

In the meantime, though, the problem remains palpable for most county residents of modest means. Justice, the single mom who’s finally feeling stable in her Swannanoa apartment, says the hardest part of her journey was watching her teenage son cope with the embarrassment of coming home to a hotel for three months before she was approved for the income-based housing.

“You’re used to providing your children with their own home, their own room, their own fenced-in yard. And when you go from that to where I was, it’s tough,” she says. “I could see the look in his eyes, like … we deserve better than this.”