News

City brings in big guns for affordable housing summit

By Bill Moss, Published: May 15, 2024

When the city of Hendersonville decided to push affordable housing as a goal, they went big.

A communitywide forum the city is hosting Thursday night features one of the hottest experts in the U.S. on the topic, a leading specialist on North Carolina efforts and the top affordable housing leader for Dogwood Trust.
“Affordable housing is one of the top five priorities for the City Council and council member (Jennifer) Hensley and council member (Lyndsey) Simpson have really taken it on as one of their key things they want to accomplish,” City Manager John Connet said last week. “We hear it in the community. We know that local industry is struggling with finding employees that can afford to live here as well as our own city employees.”
The Hendersonville City Council’s Strategic Housing Plan Steering Committee is inviting the public to participate in the 2024 Affordable Housing Summit from 5:30 to 7:45 p.m. Thursday, May 16, at the Hendersonville High School auditorium.
The keynote speaker, Shane Phillips, is a researcher, frequent speaker and consultant on housing policy and affordability. The author of The Affordable City, Phillips advocates a three-S approach to solving the housing crisis — Supply, Stability and Subsidies — and offers more than 50 recommendations for advancing housing priorities.
Joining Phillips on a panel are two other housing experts:

• Sarah Odio, associate director of the Development Finance Institute at the UNC School of Government, is an affordable housing specialist who has helped urban and rural communities across North Carolina define their housing needs and attract private investment in mixed-use and mixed-income developments.
• Sarah Grymes is a housing development expert with a strong financial background. As vice president for housing at Dogwood Trust, Grymes manages Dogwood’s work with regional partners to help increase the number of affordable housing units, help residents stay in existing homes safely and help reduce homelessness. She is the former executive director of the Housing Assistance Corp. in Hendersonville, where she secured land and financing for single- and multi-family development.

Also on the panel are Lew Holloway, the city's community development director, and Christopher Todd, the county's director of business and community development.

When Connet, City Attorney Angie Beeker, Holloway and Communications Director Allison Justus sat down with the Lightning last week to promote the summit, they emphasized that the city cannot by itself fix the affordable housing problem. Instead, they hope the community meeting acts as a catalyst for a united commitment.
“Thursday is really about bringing the community together to start a conversation,” Beeker said. “I think conversations have been happening but now we really need to focus those conversations and get everybody in one place and let them hear from an expert on housing. Nobody's gonna 100 percent agree with everything he has to say but that's okay. It generates new ideas and new thoughts and new approaches for people to hear about and for the community to start talking about.”

In addition to the Thursday night summit, the city is convening smaller workshops on Friday with several stakeholder groups.
“I think the city is trying to spearhead a movement for the whole region it because it's not just a city issue,” Connet said. “It's a county issue, too, and we're trying to bring everyone to the table.”
The city team acknowledges numerous hurdles: short-term rentals that take housing stock off the market; neighborhood uprisings against zoning to allow high-density housing; the high price of land; the stigma around subsidized housing programs like HUD's Section 8.
“Growth is gonna happen,” Beeker said. “And what I heard (Phillips) saying at one of the conferences was what a wonderful problem to have, because the opposite of that is empty storefronts and degradation and he said it's not a bad thing to have the growth. You have an opportunity to then shape your community into what you really want it to be.”

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The city is inviting the public to submit questions in advance on affordable housing. Go here to submit a question.