Affordable Housing in Charlotte:
What One City’s History Tells Us About America’s Pressing Problem
By Tom Hanchett
CONTENTS
Introduction
- Before government got involved
• Naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH)
• Market-built affordable housing - Federal help for better housing
• FHA apartments
• Public housing - Subsidizing the “free market”
• FHA 608 - Bathrooms, building codes and “slum clearance”
• Minimum housing standards?
• Or “urban renewal”? - Tax shelters and investor-built low-rent housing
• Accelerated depreciation
• FHA 221(d)3, FHA 236 and the Turnkey programs - Dispersing subsidized housing throughout the city
• Scattered-site
• Section Eight Project-based - 1980s housing revolution: inventing the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit era
• Low-Income Housing Tax Credit
• North Carolina Housing Finance Agency and NC Housing Trust Fund
• Charlotte’s Innovative Housing Fund (now Charlotte Housing Trust Fund)
• Section Eight vouchers - Remix: rediscovering mixed-income housing, 1990s -2000s
• Federal HOPE VI
• Local non-profit Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing Partnership (now DreamKey Partners) - The tumultuous 2010s
• Inlivian, RAD, and business-driven public housing
• Cheap money, K-shaped recovery, gentrification and loss of NOAH
• Local push for affordable projects – while falling further behind - Epilogue: After a whole book about affordable housing, where are we?
• Affordable housing in the Covid years
• Lessons of history
• A way forward