UNC Ponders Affordable Housing Plan
Jul. 10–CARRBORO — UNC officials have begun looking into the possibility of building affordable housing for the university’s faculty and staff on a 63-acre parcel that was once supposed to become part of the Winmore development.
The parcel now belongs to UNC’s endowment fund and fell out of the Winmore plan last summer. Campus administrators have hired a consultant to help them work on the project.
“The impetus would be to provide housing that would be 15 to 20 percent below market,” said Dwayne Pinkney, assistant vice chancellor in UNC’s Finance & Administration office. “Under the larger umbrella, all the housing would be below market, and some significant component would be truly affordable by the [federal] definition.”
Orange County officials who got wind of the university’s interest in the project organized a June 27 meeting with Pinkney to sound out the administrator and to signal their interest in working with UNC.
The conclave included staff members from the county, Carrboro, Chapel Hill and two area nonprofits that specialize in the development of low-cost housing, Habitat for Humanity and Orange Community Housing and Land Trust.
In a report to the Orange County Commissioners, County Manager John Link said the government and nonprofit officials who attended urged Pinkney to consider including rental units in the project and working with the land trust.
They also asked that the university consider “extending purchase and/or rental opportunities to the wider community of eligible occupants,” not just those with university ties, Link said.
Pinkney said later that that specific proposal likely isn’t in the cards.
“Given that it’s a university asset … I think it would be a very, very hard sell for anyone to make that the asset should be used to provide a benefit to anyone without an affiliation to the university,” he said.
But county officials are far from discouraged.
“No agreements were reached, no deals were made,” said Assistant County Manager Gwen Harvey, the most-senior official from her government who attended the meeting. “It was the opening of what we hope will be a continued conversation about how the county could be involved or influential in the development.”
The ultimate fate of the 63-acre parcel — part of the bequest the late philosophy professor Horace Williams made to the university decades ago — has been up in the air since 2001.
Winmore’s developers that year asked the university to consider adding the tract to the 67 acres they planned on acquiring just to the south.
The ensuing discussions got to the point that UNC’s Board of Trustees in March of 2002 actually agreed to sell the property to the Winmore team for $1.3 million.
The deal was contingent on the project’s including 50 to 60 homes priced at $175,000 or less for purchase by employees of the town of Carrboro, UNC Hospitals and the university.
But political disputes and lawsuits delayed Winmore’s construction, and the deal fell through last summer. At that point, state officials transferred title to the 63 acres from the university to the endowment fund.
In October, Winmore’s original development team sold their interest in the rest of the project to local developers Scott Kovens and Eric Chupp.
The university is now completely out of the Winmore project. Even after the trustees’ vote, “there was never a formal agreement executed” between UNC and the project’s original developers, Chupp said.
Winmore’s new owners still have to build 48 low-cost homes on the acreage they control and now are talking about doing townhouse-style units in cooperation with the land trust and the N.C. Housing Finance Agency, Chupp said.
Meanwhile, once UNC determined its original deal with Winmore wouldn’t work, the campus administration considered how the university might use its own resources to develop the 63 acres for faculty and staff housing, Pinkney said.
Their study includes a look at similar projects at other universities. Link’s memo said developments affiliated with Yale and Stanford are possible role models for UNC’s.
Campus officials also have to figure out how they’d build the units, and how they’d allot them to potential residents. Few possible answers to those questions have been ruled out because “it is very, very early in the planning of this process,” Pinkney said.
One key question is how the university would guarantee the long-term affordability of the units. Pinkney said officials are considering ideas like the land trust — which retains title to the land a house sits on and leases use rights to the homeowner — and restrictive covenants.
No one’s sure how many units UNC could build on the site.
“We need to actually evaluate the site [physically and legally] to see what can be done out there,” Pinkney said. “It’s 63 acres, but we know there are going to be certain restrictions.”
Despite all that, Pinkney hopes to have a preliminary report ready to show to the Board of Trustees sometime this fall. The goal at that point would be to get the trustees to sign off on the basic concept of using the site for housing, he said.
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