City of Durham SCAD Task Force Meeting - October 27, 2023
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City of Durham SCAD Task Force Meeting - October 27, 2023
This task force meeting, held on October 27, 2023, focused on the Streamlined Compliance and Development (SCAD) proposal. Members discussed the proposal's potential impact on housing affordability, supply, and community trust. The meeting included opening remarks from academic researchers, a proposal to extend the task force, and detailed debate on specific provisions such as small lots and flag lots. No final decisions were made, but the task force agreed to consider additional meetings and provide a report to the city council before the November 20, 2023 council meeting.
Discussion Items
- Opening Remarks from Experts: Kay Jowers (Duke University) and Dr. Spurlock (UNC) presented their research on affordable housing and offered to evaluate SCAD's effects if implemented. They noted that updated data through 2023 is available and that preliminary results would be ready in early 2024.
- Task Force Extension: Councilwoman Freeman proposed adding two to three more meetings to thoroughly review the remaining five of eight major topics. The idea received mixed reactions, with some members supporting continued dialogue and others preferring to focus on the UDO rewrite.
- Task Force Member Positions:
- Opponents: Several speakers (Miss Joina, James Chavis, Joseph Fleming, Regina Mays, Katie Ross, Tom Miller) expressed strong opposition. They argued that SCAD would remove regulations without guaranteeing affordability, would disproportionately harm working-class communities, and was developed without adequate community input. Miss Joina reported receiving threats from proponents. Katie Ross cited an 8.2% apartment vacancy rate and a 4,900-unit pipeline, arguing there is no housing shortage, only a shortage of subsidized units. Tom Miller called for a line-by-line review of SCAD provisions.
- Proponents: Jim Anthony, Adam Foreman, Tover Thomas, and Bob Chapman defended SCAD. Anthony noted that the process began nearly two years ago with over 100 community meetings and that the planning department recommended 94-96% of SCAD items. Foreman, a former New York City housing advisor, argued that increasing supply is a key tool alongside subsidies and stability. Thomas emphasized that small-lot changes could lower per-unit costs and allow for more affordable rentals (e.g., 600 sq ft units at $800-900/month). Chapman stated that SCAD aims to reduce land costs by allowing denser development on existing lots.
- Specific Provisions: Discussion focused on small lots, flag lots, and ADUs. Tom Miller criticized SCAD's changes to small lot rules, arguing they would allow larger homes (up to 2,000 sq ft) that are not entry-level. Anthony countered that additional height and basement space could create more bedrooms or separate units without increasing land use. Concerns about water runoff, fire safety, and lack of geographic limitations were raised by Mr. Chavis and others.
- Trust and Communication: The mayor and councilwoman Freeman highlighted the need for better communication, plain language, and acknowledgment of historical housing discrimination against African Americans. They noted that trust in the planning department had been damaged and that the task force could help rebuild it.
Key Outcomes
- The task force agreed to consider at least one more meeting before the November 20, 2023 city council meeting to allow members to present their findings.
- Members will receive an updated working document and a survey about their availability for future meetings.
- No formal votes were taken; the task force will continue deliberating on the remaining SCAD provisions and potentially submit recommendations to the council.
Meeting Transcript
All right, thank you all so much for being here this evening. Uh I do know that there are some folks in traffic. Um we will uh give them a little grace to get here, but we will go ahead and get started. Uh I foresee us having more rich debate. And uh we have some documents to reference in front of us to help guide our conversation. Uh and we will try and uh do our best to um to come to some sense of recommendations provided for uh to provide for the council. We are gonna open this evening up with some remarks from our um remarks from our subject matter experts. Attorney Jowers from Duke University. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to address the task force. I'm Kay Jowers and the director of a program called Just Environments at Duke University. It's a program that's shared between the Keenan Institute for Ethics and the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment Sustainability. And while I am trained as an attorney, I'm not here in my capacity necessarily as an attorney. It my um employer is actually employed me as under as a social science researcher under my um PhD in sociology, and I run a research program that addresses issues of environmental justice with using a research justice lens. We define environmental justice to include housing and housing affordability, um, and we use multiple methods. We use community-led participatory methods, we use uh computational approaches and qualitative approaches to conduct our research. We generally do the research in collaborative teams with other PhDs, so Dr. Spurlock and I collaborate quite a bit. Um we also have collaborators at the University of Wisconsin, our collaborator at the University of Wisconsin is at the business school and runs a center on affordable housing analysis. He's an economist. So in sum, we have a lot of academic expertise analyzing issues of affordable housing and social justice, and we also work with community co-creators to ensure that our research questions are tailored in ways that um it that are informed by the community expertise. Our primary community partner in our work in analyzing housing issues in Durham has been communities in partnership that's led by Cameron Smith. We have also worked with other community organizations. So I want to back up and explain my understanding of the main arguments on both sides, and this may take us back to the higher level, and I know we're trying to get into the specifics, but just wanted to make sure I could explain what we could offer. So from what I understand, the proposal proponents want to increase the number of houses on the market that will reduce competition, housing prices stabilize, and this in turn will maintain um or or provide some affordable housing. And so the evidence applied for this. I have seen the stack of papers that Mr. Chapman provided. I am going through that as I go through it. I'm looking for peer-reviewed article references, not news, not white papers, and I'm also looking to see that the context in which that research were done match the state of North Carolina, where we have a lot of state laws that preempt the ability of local governments to utilize certain uh mechanisms to provide affordable housing. The opponents say that building more houses may be necessary but not sufficient, and the evidence presented has been the lived experience of community members, and um I believe that you know that in and of itself has value. However, I know decision makers also like numbers, statistics, and quantified things. So uh we wanted to make sure that we mentioned that we have skills at evaluating these things that we could offer to the task force or to the UDO process. And um last meeting, councilwoman Freeman offered up uh a proposal that the properties that are ready to go forward, the projects that are ready to go forward that the proponents are referencing could be put forward as an experiment and uh be evaluated. And uh so we wanted to point out that that is something that if it were done, we could help evaluate because we have been evaluating for the past several years different uh projects and proposals that have been adopted in Durham. Um we had only had the data through 2016, and as you all know, the landscape in Durham has changed dramatically since 2016, but we recently got the updated data through uh 2023, the second quarter of 2023, which gives us micro data at the household level on uh race, wealth, and income, whether children are present, and a number of other factors. We also have the universe of rental listings so that we could see at what price rental units were listed. Um that microdata is with Dr. Spurlock at UNC. She could speak to the years, our housing data on households goes back to 26 2006. And we also, when we combine that with the universe of deeds and transactions in Durham, we can trace uh what happens when people are displaced by different policies, where they go. Do they have longer commute times? Uh what are they exposed to in terms of increased or decreased environmental exposures, school quality, crime. We can also look at whether certain stakeholders that are addressing affordable housing are preserving it over time. We have students who have pulled the deeds and are assessing the whether or not those deeds have restrictions in them that will preserve future affordability. We have also been assessing whether or not the ADUs that have been built since 2019 have been used as affordable housing, or are they listed as short-term rentals? So we have teams of students and researchers working on those things. We cannot get it done in the time frame of this task force. We should have the preliminary results early next year, and we thought it would be unfortunate if we didn't tell you that this is coming and you were to make a recommendation to the council with and we will have this evaluation for uh to inform a decision fairly shortly. Thank you for the opportunity to address the council.
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