To keep affordable apartments from disappearing, Charlotte commits $1M more
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Housing in Charlotte
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Charlotte City Council has allocated a little more than $1 million toward the purchase of another apartment building to keep rents there affordable.
Council members on Monday unanimously approved the request from Ascent Housing to buy the 44-unit The Pines on Wendover, in the Wendover-Sedgewood neighborhood near Costwold.
It’s the latest property identified by Ascent Housing, which last year announced a $58 million fund to buy older apartment buildings in quickly-changing areas and preserve rents to be affordable for low- and moderate-income families.
Preserving these naturally occurring affordable housing, or NOAH, properties is among the city’s key strategies to address the local housing crisis.
Council member Larken Egleston, whose district includes the Wendover Road property, praised the effort.
“It’s in a place that has seen, and will continue to see, public and private investment,” he said, noting he has seen prices increase in his District 1.
“The more of these type of opportunities we can find to lock in affordability, particularly near the city, near transit corridors, near job opportunities, we need to do it.”
Charlotte Housing Trust Fund
The $1.05 million for the Wendover property comes from the city’s Housing Trust Fund. Charlotte voters in November approved another $50 million in bonds for the fund to be used over the next two years.
Unlike the typically twice-yearly allocations of Housing Trust Fund money for new construction projects, City Council considers requests to buy existing affordable developments on a rolling basis because of concerns the buildings could be scooped up by investors looking to raise rents.
New construction can take up to two years for approval and completion, but housing advocates say that many more affordable units disappear during that time when investors buy up older properties, flip them and raise rents.
Units in properties bought through the fund will be affordable to households between 30% and 80% of the area median income, or between $25,250 and $67,350 for a family of four.
Ascent Housing leaders have said the goal is to acquire more than 1,400 apartment units in neighborhoods at risk of or actively gentrifying and displacing current residents by 2022. The fund’s first purchase was the 144-unit Lake Mist Apartments off Old Pineville Road.
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