Will 2045 plan promote housing?
May 11—HIGH POINT — A trade group that lobbies governments on behalf of developers, builders and real estate brokers questions whether High Point's new long-range growth guide will promote affordable housing.
Judy Stalder, regulatory affairs director for the Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, or TREBIC, said she thinks the High Point 2045 Comprehensive Plan doesn't call for enough housing density and supports ideas that could make housing more costly.
The plan, which was unanimously adopted by the City Council this week, sets out a general framework for how each part of High Point could grow over the next 20 years.
It will serve as a guide for the city's zoning ordinance, which sets the rules for what can be built and where.
The new plan maps out 11 "place types" and recommends certain types of development within each one.
"There are some areas of concern if we want this plan to promote more housing, as well as more affordable housing," Stalder told the council before it adopted the plan. "The place-types map promotes primarily single-family detached housing. We all know that's not the way that we will grow or the best way to grow."
The plan classifies most of north High Point and other areas where the heaviest residential growth has occurred as the "suburban neighborhood" place type, with low-density, single-family detached housing as the predominant development pattern.
"The suburban neighborhood should include gentle density housing, such as duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes. We already do that for our core city and we should be doing it across the city," Stalder said.
The plan should also support higher density housing, including multifamily, in urban neighborhoods around the downtown, and should not call for large-lot subdivisions, as it does in some of the rural future annexation areas on the city's edges, she argued.
"It just promotes sprawl," said Stalder. "The lots are going to be private property, not open space. So, they're not preserved for wildlife or people."
The plan says the city should consider "inclusionary" housing programs to encourage or require that a portion of future residential projects be reserved for affordable units and should require sidewalks on both sides of the street in new developments.
Stalder said both ideas could drive up the cost of housing and price some buyers out of the market.
Recommendations like these are based on the wishes of the public, who identified priorities like more walkability and preservation of open space during the process in which the plan was put together over the past year, said Matt Ingalls, one of the consultants who worked on the project.
He said the plan is a guide that sets broad goals and is not a set of hard and fast regulations.
"I think we'll have the opportunity on a case-by-case basis to look at the cost and benefit of every decision to determine how we move forward," said Mayor Cyril Jefferson. "I think we share the sentiment in terms of supporting what leads to more housing and more affordability of housing."
