NC lawmakers look to ease housing shortage (05-01-2025--Hour2)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive. Content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. WRAL reporting that more North Carolina property owners would get new freedoms under a bill proposed by North Carolina state lawmakers giving us freedoms. The House Committee on Regulatory Reform gave preliminary approval to a bill that would allow many North Carolinians to build at least one eight hundred square foot accessory dwelling unit on their property, provided it doesn't violate the neighborhood private covenants. In other words, your hoa okay. So if your HOA doesn't allow you to build the accessory dwelling unit commonly referred to as an ADU or a do if you will. As long as your HOA doesn't ban them, then a city cannot. Okay. So if you're if they're in. Every HOA has what's called CCRs covenants, codes and restrictions. Right, these are your rules that you have to abide by. They're very difficult to change, like usually it takes like two thirds of all of the the residents to make any changes to them. So if you allow, if you're not allowed, if your HOA says you can't do it, then you can't do it. But if you don't live in an HOA, or your HOA allows you to build these things, then you would be allowed to do something with your own property. Wow, this is an amazing concept. You can build an eight hundred square foot granny flat, that's what we always used to call them, or you know, an in law suite or something. There are different names for them. You don't have to call it. No, you don't have to call it that. But anyway, Accessory dwelling units or ad us sometimes referred to as the granny flats or backyard homes. I've never called it that. People use them as extra living spaces or as rental spaces. That's right. Yeah, you could actually build an eight hundred square foot granny flat back there and have an Airbnb rent it out to somebody. Yes, you can put your in laws in it, two whatever, stick your kid out there. When they get too old to be living in your house, send them out there, charge them rent whatever, income generation. But also a pretty good starter home for people to live in. Very small. You know, it's like it could be just a studio. I mean, well eight hundred square feet. You can actually have you know, a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room area. My first house was like nine hundred and fifty square feet. It was three bed, one bath, and a living room in a kitchen. That's it. So yeah, like chop out one of the one of the bedrooms. It's a pretty good sized domicile. This is House BILLT six two seven. It would allow North Carolina municipalities to continue to regulate these things by restricting them to the backyards, so you couldn't stick them in the front yard. You could also require that they are smaller than the main house, or you can require them to be built a certain distance away from a street or from a property line, so stuff like that. The cities are still going to be to regulate, but the bill would prohibit municipalities from banning adu's outright now, ADUs do have some critics. They often say that they worry about the increase in traffic, which is. Always the concern. Oh my gosh, every single nimbi uses traffic. It's always the go to the first argument against any kind of project or you know, renovation or something. It's always any zoning petition, it's always what about the traffic, the impact of the traffic. And to be sure, when you add more residential you're going to get more people. That's kind of goes hand in hand. I'm not sure if people realize this or not, but it's true when you build more homes, you end up with more people. And people are traffic. You are traffic. You you are traffic. When you are driving, you are traffic. Okay, so when you're complaining about all of the other traffic, they're complaining about you too, right. Just want that to be very very clear here. And part of the deal with living in a large metropolitan area is it's a large metropolitan areas. That's part of the description of the thing. Lots of people and as I just mentioned, people are traffic. So lots of people, lots of traffic. It's like people who move into a city and then complain about all of the noises in the city. When look when I when. I went to work in Ashville, I I was looking to rent an apartment because I still had the house here in Charlotte. Christy was still working here in Charlotte, so we kept that as our residence. And then I went to look for a rental apartment in Ashville. And I was just going to be basically, you know, driving up on like Sunday night, stay there, work the week you know, in Ashville, and then either I would come home for the weekend or Christy would go up there for the weekend. Well, the I went looking for apartments and I found one. Excuse me, I found one. And if you know. Downtown Ashville, they do call it downtown, not uptown. They downtown Ashville. There was a coffee shop called Old Europe, and there was an apartment for rent right above the coffee shop. And this would have fulfilled I don't want to say a lifelong dream of mine, because it wasn't really a dream and it was definitely not lifelong. But basically, ever since I started watching Friends, and I was like, man, I would love to live above. A coffee shop. I wouldn't get any sleep at all. Right, I wouldn't need to. I'm above a coffee shop. But I loved the idea of it right there in the heart of downtown, you know. And the more I thought about it, and I went downtown, I looked at the you know, looked at the street and all and everything, and it's it's right there in the heart of downtown. And I was like, you know what, though, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be that guy, you know, with the with the tank top T shirt, you know, at two in the morning, opening the window, screaming out, eh, keep it down out there. I mean, I would first have to go and buy those those T shirts, those muscle shirt t shirts, which I don't even understand why people wear those things, because like the whole point of the T shirt is to like mop up the underwarm sweat, right, So like, why do you cut that out of the T. Shirt in the first place? Anyway, so the and you can see it through your through the white shirts like a dress shirt. Why do people wear the muscle shirts under a dress shirt that you could see through. It doesn't make any sense. And really, anyway, I didn't want to be that guy, mainly because I didn't want to wear the T shirt. But also I knew enough about myself to know that at you know, two in the morning, three in the morning. At my at this point, i'm you know, I guess thirty five, forty years old. I know, yeah, probably about forty years old. And I just know myself, to quote Chandler bing, like, I want to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and that's okay, that's okay. I didn't want to live in the downtown urban environment of Ashville. Also, it's it's only you know, on the second floor, which basically you're on the street then, and they have a they got a bit of a problem in downtown Ashville. I'm not sure you're aware of this. A lot of people screaming and yelling, attacking each other with machetes, beating drums all day, stuff like that. So like I just I didn't want to I didn't want to deal with it and then the protests. So I just went in a suburban setting apartment. I just did that. But I would have loved to have done that, but I knew that that's what you get when you go into a city, You're gonna get those noises. It's not on the city to accommodate you. You know, it's part of living in a city. So critics say that they worry about the increase in traffic and residential areas. Under the bill, municipalities would not be allowed to require the creation of parking spots as a condition of ADU construction. So that's one of the ways that governments will restrict the building is they'll say, yeah, sure you can put in an ADU. You can build a granny flat in your backyard. Yeah sure, you just have to dedicate a parking space for it. Now where are you going to do that. You can't do it on the street. You don't on that street. So now you got to what, widen your driveway and dedicate a parking spot for it. You may have a double car or driveway or something, but now you've got to dedicate one. And maybe they do some codes on what the parking spot must have, like the concrete wheel stops or something, maybe like a sign for handicapped parking. I don't know. And so there are all sorts of ways that they can tinker with these zoning rules to basically ban the thing. But this law says you can't do that. There's no requirement for a parking spot. State Representative Pricey Harrison, Democrat, Guilford County. She says the legislature shouldn't dictate a municipality's housing rules. Quote. I do not like for us to step in and tell local governments what they can and cannot do, but I want locals to tell people what they can and cannot do. I'm just I added that last part. That's what she's saying. She's like, Oh, the state shouldn't be telling the cities, which, by the way, the cities are creations of the state. They are chartered by the state. They are administrative units of the state. Okay. An individual is not an administrative unit of a city. So she doesn't want the state to dictate to its administrative unit that it can't dictate to individuals what they could do with. Their own property. This is what passes for leftist logic. Now, all right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. The North Carolina lawmakers looking at easing the restrictions on ad us. I got a couple of messages from Paul who says, if you don't like hearing people complain about traffic, move somewhere with no people. That's true. That's a good piece of advice. It's just it's one of those things every single rezoning that I ever sat through as a reporter or watched on a government channel, any rezoning where people did not want the project to occur, they always cited traffic always, and I just it's like, I don't unless you're going to say like that you need to widen the road. And by the way, this is that's a legitimate argument because the City of Charlotte has not built up the infrastructure for the amount of residential development that they have approved. Right they haven't focused on their core functions, their core services. They do a little bit here and there. You know, they'll make the developer put in sidewalks, widen roads where they can. But like my first no sorry, second house was down in Steel Creek and we would drive when we bought the house, it would take twenty minutes to get to work here in we're on the sort of the west side of uptown and Christy worked in Center City and it would take us twenty minutes. And by the time we sold the house, I think about six seven years later, it took her an hour to get to work because Highway one sixty right Steel Creek, they haven't widened it, and it's just it's just a long, single lane of stopped traffic two times a day. It's just awful. And they and what prompted us to put the house on the market. At this point, I'm working in Nashville. I'm only home on weekends to mow the yard. Basically, she's her commute is now an hour each way. And we see the rezoning signs go up for some farm land. I pull up the rezoning petition on my phone and it's like eight hundred something units, and I'm like, this intersection is going to be completely overwhelmed. And there's another rezoning right across the street. It's going to be awful. And so I said, maybe we just sell this house, and we did, and then we took an apartment in Center City, and then of course the riots broke out and all of that. We're like, okay, that was a nice experiment for the you know, year and a half. Let's get out. And that was it. We moved out of that place. So adding the allowing people to put in these ad us in their backyards is I think the right move. You can't keep complaining about there not being enough housing and housing being unaffordable and everything and not build more housing. And this is more housing, and it's small. It's it's starter right. You could you could rent this out to let your kid save up money to to buy put a down payment on a house. Somebody else wants to live in a you know, suburban environment, good schools or something. Whatever. They want to you know, move their parents out of a house and into this granny flat like that's it serves so many purposes, and yet cities block this stuff. Denzel Burnside, the executive director of the housing advocacy group North Carolina Housing Table, spoken in favor of the bill at the legislature. He said ADUs are a simple and defective solution that create more affordable homes. The News and Observer reporting in a related story. This legislative session, dozens of bills have been proposed to encourage developers to boost supply. The North Carolina Housing Coalition is tracking roughly one hundred and twenty bills. Here's a great idea. 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Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight, three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Got an email A couple of them. Actually, this from Dave, who says, oh my gosh, thank you Pete for the T shirt comment. I never understood the muscle wife beater T shirts. A T shirt is there to sop up under arms sweat. And here's another thing. Have you ever seen some guy wearing one of those muscles T shirts under a regular T shirt? What the heck is that about? I don't know. I yeah, I don't understand it either. They serve no purpose, like, oh, I got to cover up my stomach, Like what, I don't get it. Just get a T shirt if you want to show off your guns, like, just get one with you know, the short sleeves, the shorter sleeves up there, you know. But generally I find that the people who wear those things don't have the guns to be showing off. So I don't get it. Email from Pete. Yes, traffic is always the argument against development until it is not. When they were trying to get approval for the Waiverley development at forty five in Providence, they said traffic was going to have minimal impact because it was only going to add about five thousand car trips to the area. Well they were right. Traffic out there is insane and Michael says Shopton Road West and Steel Creek Road are both horrible in the mornings, And that is exactly the intersection I was talking about. There is a huge development in process right now on Sledge Road that is going to make it double horrible. Where oh where on Sledge I lived right off a Sledge We moved in there and they had not redesigned that crazy three way the triangle setup that they had there. They did while we were there. They did realign that thing because it was super dangerous. It was like one of the most dangerous intersections in the city. But yeah, it's one of those things like people complain about they're not being enough housing, and they complain about too much apartments, too many apartments getting built. But then they complain also about these granny flats which would disperse housing right instead of building. You think about it. If you have a neighborhood that's a thousand hole homes and I don't know, say two hundred of them, say twenty percent put in a granny flat. So now that's two hundred apartments that are not going to get built in a two hundred unit apartment complex. And it's now spread out over a one thousand house neighborhood. Doesn't that sound like it's a better idea than to pack two hundred altogether at some intersection. You know, it's one of these. Things like there isn't any there are no solutions, there are only trade. Offs, right, and so it's one of these things. Where it's like trying to punch smoke to try to nail people down on what exactly you're objecting to, because I think what it comes down to is I got my piece of paradise. I'm going to pull the ladder up behind me. That is the prevailing sentiment in Asheville. Every It was amazing. I've said this before. Every single rezoning petition or development petition that came before the city would have people show up and speak against it, and they would all start by saying like almost and I'm not kidding, like every single speaker would start off by saying something like I moved to Ashville ten years ago, and then they would proceed to explain why nobody else should be allowed to move to Ashville. It's like I got mine, everybody else stay out. And the only reason that they're they're speaking in front of the city council is because somebody else who said the same thing to the city council lost their appeal. Right, they came out saying, don't let that guy move in, and they lost. And now that guy moves in, and I was like, don't let some other person move in. They also had this really crazy thing where it's like they didn't want anymore sprawl. Right, that's the other thing too, We don't want to don't approve any new subdivisions because that's sprawl. But then they also didn't want to build tall buildings because it would ruin the view shed is what they call it, the view shed like a watershed, but it's the view and you're gonna. Spoil my view. I don't want a tall building. These are people that don't even live in the city in the downtown area. And by the way, Asheville is only like ninety thousand people. It's the size of rock Hill, okay, and they've got like three tall buildings. The ability to build a new skyscraper or tall building in downtown Ashville is so limited that I believe the guy's name is mckibbon. Peter mckibbon, I think is his name, and he redid the old BB and T building. It looked like a Soviet era concrete block right in the middle of the city. And he rehabbed the whole thing, ripped off the whole face of it, redid it all, made it condos, and there was like a boutique hotel on a couple of the floors, And of course that got opposition. We don't need any more hotels, hey, Taurus, just give us your money, though, And they thought over this, and he had said he could not build a tall building, so he just he spent more to refurbish the exterior of this building, to rip it all apart, because he knew he would never get approval to build a skyscraper. So when that building became available, that's what he did with it. So you don't want to build up, you don't want to build out, you don't want apartment buildings, you don't want ADUs, you don't want these granny flats, and you don't want any more housing to be built. But you also want housing to be cheap. Oh, and you also want a lot of you know, really high paying jobs. Guys like this is not logical, Okay, this is. All right. Back to this News and Observer piece bi partisan bills have been introduced there. The North Carolina Housing Coalitions tracking one hundred and twenty bills and a cluster of bipartisan bills to expand state wide housing what they call missing middle the missing middle these middle class housing duplexes, town homes, and the ADUs in single family neighborhoods. No, we can't do that. Hey, have you been over to Elizabeth, Not the city, but the area of Charlotte, the Elizabeth area. You know they got quadplexes all throughout that whole neighborhood, right. I looked at a bunch of them when I first moved to Charlotte. Too expensive for me at the time to just rent like a one bedroom, and they're just you know, it's like a rectangle building. You got four units. The downstairs got little patios and the upstairs got balconies. There's one main door in and then there's a staircase that goes up to the two units upstairs and one on each side. It's four apartments and they fit in with the character of that neighborhood, I would submit a little bit of and more so, they fit in with the the you know, the architectural esthetic of the neighborhood better than the McMansions that got built there. Are you seeing what's happening? Also in South Park now you got million, multimillion dollar mansions that are being torn down because the lots they sit on are large, and the developers then can come in tear down the multimillion dollar mansion and put up three story, two million dollar condos and they can pack in like twenty of them. They call them duets because you can't call it a duplex when you're spending two million dollars on a on a town home, you know that's connected to another town. You're sharing a wall. Look, if I'm paying two million dollars, I do not want to share a wall with anybody, you know. But people will. People will because they want to be in South Park, which gosh, that's I rented over there when I moved back to Charlotte to take this job, and we lived in the South Park area, and holy smokes, it's ridiculous over there now. The traffic, oh, I hate traffic. Now. I would walk most places I could, but South Park wasn't really designed for walkers, you know. So the bipartisan bills. State lawmakers are also exploring allowing housing development by right. In other words, you don't need to get permits in any area that is currently zoned for commercial use. So you have a commercially zoned area. If a developer comes in there and they want to do residential builds, they would be allowed to do that on a commercially zoned property. This is like the whole mixed use development idea. It's not a new idea. It used to just be called main street. You had shops on the ground floor and then you had apartments above. It was a mix right until the planners got all up in there in the seventies and they started saying, no, we're going to put you over here. We're going to segregate you guys over there. You're just residential. Now you're commercial over here. And then everybody's going to drive everywhere, and then of course you got a lot of traffic. Look at Independence Boulevard, like that's the poster child for this kind of terrible planning ideology. In recent years, missing middle policies have sparked lawsuits across the country. Up in Raleigh, some residents worried about overcrowding, increased traffic, and changes to the look and feel of their neighborhoods. Okay, So here's another one of the things that I feel like people need to be aware of. You do not have a right. To preserve the look and feel of other people's properties. I'm not sure who needs to hear that, but I feel like a lot of people do. So I said it. Okay, things change, everything changes, right, It's the one constant. Everything changes. Cities change, right, neighborhoods change, houses change. People paint them, they fix them, they renovate them, whatever. And if it's not your property, then like you can't stop people from wanting to do something with their property to improve it in some way, just because you don't like the look of it. It's one of the biggest things I run into with the HOA that I'm in. Also, it's like, I don't like the look of those colored rocks. Not your property, it's not your house. They may like the red lava rocks. I personally hate them. I hate is Actually that's not even strong enough. Detest them. Okay, I detest the red lava rocks. Would never put them in my I rip them out at my previous house. But if somebody else loves them and they want to put them in their property. Then let them do it. It's not for me to tell you what to do with your own property it. Oh, but what about if I put you know, pink flamingos in the front yard. Okay, well that's the line. Okay, I draw the line of the pink flamingos. Just kidding, all right. So spring is here a time of renewal and celebrations. You've got graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and the special days for mom and dad. Your family's making memories that are going to last a lifetime. But let me ask you, are all of those treasured moments from days gone by? Are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, eight millimeter films, photos slides? Are they preserved? Because over time, these precious memories can fade and deteriorate, losing the magic of yesterday. At Creative Video, they help you protect what matters most. 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I wouldn't give you more protection than the wife Beater. Right T shirt does? I said, I don't get it. I appreciate the attempt to inform me, Jen, but I cannot wrap my mind around it. All Right, So, the state legislature has a series of bills looking to boost housing supply Senebill four ninety seven. It includes allowing denser housing formats so up to six plexes and town homes in any area zoned for single family houses, so you can build a six plex. It would also prohibit local governments from discouraging development through unreasonable costs or delay, including zoning, development, sighting, or design review standards. Cenebill four ninety nine would allow housing development by right in any area currently zoned only for commercial, office or retail use. I'm okay with that one. You got a commercial area, retail area, office area, you want to put up housing in there, I'm fine with that. I'm not saying I would like live at the mall, but I'm fine with allowing for it. The bill would also allow the conversion of a building or part of a building from commercial to residential use. Why wouldn't that be allowed now zoning? Another bill. Filed by Gloris stein Brown, a Pitt County Democrat, called the Housing Choice Act, would permit by right, multi family residential development in municipalities with under one hundred thousand residents multi family residential development. If you're in a city under one hundred thousand by Gashville, by right, you would be able to build multi family. It would also waive construction related fees for low and moderate income housing, allowing ADUs and offer first time home buyer education programs. Well, the first step in that education program should be can you actually afford this house? That should be the first lesson. There's a bill by Donnie Loftus, a Gaston County Republican, along with a Wake County Democrat, Alison Dahl. It would restrict local governments from requiring a minimum number or size of off street parking spaces, and it would clarify the limits of local stormwater requirements for redevelopment sites. I will say the parking spaces thing. I because when we moved into the apartment in Center City, we got one parking spot and we have there's two of us. We have two cars, so we were only allowed one assigned spot, which Christy got and now so I just was always on the lookout and it would sometimes it would take me, like on a Friday night when I would come back from Ashville, trying to find a parking spot on Friday night was difficult because you know, people in the apartment building they were having friends over before they went out club in or whatever, and it would always be full and there wasn't a lot of parking spaces for that. For the number of apartments they go on to say in this article at The News and Observer that the number of households in the state is projected to increase by five percent between now and twenty twenty nine. That results in an estimated housing gap of basically three quarters of a million units. So we're seven hundred and sixty five thousand units short within four years. That includes it breaks down to be like a sixty forty split between for sale and rental units. So like we need to add three hundred and twenty two thousand rental units and four hundred forty two thousand four sale units in four years. Where are they going to go? Right? People need jobs in order to afford these places, So you've got to locate them where the jobs are. And if all of the. Job are clustering her into the metro area because that's where the workforce is that you're trying to pull from, right then, I don't know, Like maybe I'm thinking this through right now, they're Okay, let me preface there are no bad ideas under the cone of creativity. Okay, I am right now firmly ensconced in the cone of creativity, So do not attack me for this idea. But how about like company towns. Right, Like you bring in a manufacture of some kind and they built like a Hershey, Pennsylvania, Right, I do that, like Hershey the guy he built the Hershey factory, right, and then as part of the factory, he built this whole town around it for all the workers to live in. And then you can set up like a store. You could do a grocery store, and you could charge too much money so people could never afford all of the groceries. They go into debt, and then they can never quit or move out. Okay, right, don't do that last part. But that is how company stores would would keep people there. But that like maybe we see maybe there should be some sort of a regulatory or tax break for that kind of a deal, right, rather than just announcing, oh, we got this big, you know, corporate investment. This manufacturer is going to locate here. Okay, Well, they're going to locate here, and then they should have a housing component as part of their project, and we give them some breaks for doing that. And now you've got people who would you know, theoretically work there and live right nearby. I'm under the cone of creativity, Okay. Eric Brawn, the founder of Raleigh Fulward and a retired land use and litigation attorney, said there's no magic bullet solution. However, he believes these reforms. Some of these reforms would lead to more inventory. You may want to sit down for this. That would make housing more affordable across the state. If you build more of the thing, then it becomes more available and the prices come down. It's like supply and demand kind of thing for real. You can look it up. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.