A little earlier this fall, I was one of four panelists who spoke to the Chapel Hill Leadership program at the Chapel Hill Carrboro Chamber of Commerce. The class asked some interesting and tough questions, but the foundation for one of the questions was clearly a simplistic connection (trumped up by the Chamber staff) between housing prices and the Rural Buffer.

The Chamber has been showing increasing hostility toward the Rural Buffer, claiming among other things that the Rural Buffer severely limits the supply of housing in the two towns and drives land costs up to their dramatic levels. I countered, supported by Bill Strom, that the main cause of high housing prices around here is that it is such a nice place to live. Unless you increased the housing supply around here to the point that the market was dramatically overbuilt, housing prices would remain high no matter what kinds of development restrictions were eliminated.

But the Chamber staff was loathe to admit that private enterprise was at all the source of the problem. I pointed out the prices are pretty much just as high in northeast Chatham County where (until last year) development was allowed to pretty well run hog wild. No, said the Chamber: There are plenty of inexpensive dwellings for sale in Chatham.

So, I did a little search on the MLS that afternoon on dwellings for sale in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City School District at the moment. There are 99 dwellings for sale in the district that are offered at less than $185,000. You can click the following link to see here.

By contrast, in northeast Chatham County including the Town of Pittsboro, the same search revealed only 37 dwellings for sale for under $185,000. You can see them here.

Now, just so you know, I also looked at the top end of the real estate market: There are 125 dwellings for sale over $650,000 in the Chapel Hill School District and there are 126 dwellings over that price for sale in northeast Chatham and Pittsboro. So rampant development in NE Chatham seems to be producing about the same kind of high end housing stock that careful planning is producing in southern Orange County.

While there is no doubt that we have housing affordability issues in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the fact is that rampant development in Chatham County has produced lots of high end housing and very little affordable development. And that is exactly the same type of development that we are getting in Chapel Hill and Carrboro where development rules are much more strict. It’s just that in Chapel Hill and Carrboro we also are getting greenways, clean drinking water, and compact, transit/pedestrian-friendly development, all while preserving the rural character of the surrounding landscape.

This entry was written by Mark on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 and is filed under Mark's notes. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.