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Proposal seeks to add workforce housing in North Carolina

A bill co-sponsored by Forsyth state Senator Paul Lowe is designed to increase the number of affordable homes in North Carolina for essential workers and other first-time homebuyers.

Senate Bill 317’s authors say it addresses a crisis in affordable housing for frontline workers including nurses, teachers, law enforcement officers and firefighters. 

The bill defines “workforce housing” as developments of at least 10 acres with at least 20 percent of the dwellings for one- or two-family homes. It puts some restrictions on what local governments can require on such things as lot widths, density and some building design elements.

Half the homes deemed workforce housing would go to people whose income does not exceed 80 percent of the area median income.

Yongqiang Chu, director of the Childress Klein Center for Real Estate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says if passed the measure would ease some regulatory burdens facing home builders.

“I think this is a good thing and hopefully it will ease a lot of restrictions and increase the supply at the low end of the housing market.”

Still, Chu says multifamily units may be a better way to boost affordable housing than one- to two-family homes. 

If approved, the law would go into effect in October.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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