RALEIGH – The city of Raleigh doesn’t earn above a C in affordable housing, according to community leaders. 

Livable Raleigh invited panelists for a community conversation on housing June 4 at the Tarboro Road Community Center. There, residents put their heads together to discuss solutions to the affordable housing crisis. Panelists were Carmen Cauthen, Octavia Rainey, Wake County Housing Authority Chair Yolanda Taylor, Wanda Hunter and Raleigh Planning Commission member Tolulope Omokaiye.

“The city is stuck doing pretty much the same thing year after year,” Livable Raleigh member Bob Geary said. “And it’s not getting us anywhere. We’re falling farther and farther behind on our need for affordable housing at every income level.” 

Livable Raleigh is a grassroots volunteer group of residents that informs the public to encourage civic engagement. The group polls local voters on key issues like housing, transportation, campaign finance and civic engagement. According to their recent poll results, 70% of respondents think Raleigh is “not doing enough to provide affordable housing for residents at every income level.”

Geary asked each panelist to give the city a grade for its affordable housing performance. 

“I would get a spanking if I got an F,” Cauthen told the audience. “We can figure out other ways to spank the city, but a D-minus you can come up from.”

Omokaiye gave the city a D because there are “minor things being done.” Taylor also gave a D, as “there has been some investment,” and the city “finally” has an Affordable Housing Plan, but “they haven’t done enough.” Rainey, who used to be vice chair of Raleigh’s Affordable Housing Committee, gave the city a C-minus.

Hunter, who has lived most of her life in Southeast Raleigh, gave a D.  “Even from childhood, I cannot tell you when housing affordability was under control,” Hunter said. 

According to Raleigh’s Housing Plan, only 408 affordable units annually are expected to be built over the next four years, while simultaneously losing approximately 4,700 affordable units in the same amount of time. Livable Raleigh was one of many community groups that pushed the city to implement $200 million for an affordable housing bond this year, but only half of that will make it to the ballot in November: voters will decide on $101.5 million. 

“The system here in Raleigh was created to do what it’s done,” Cauthen said. Cauthen grew up upper-middle class but struggled financially until she started receiving Social Security checks. She almost lost her house. 

Policies of restrictive deed covenants, redlining and urban renewal are all pieces of the same system meant to exclude and annex low-income and people of color into specific geographic areas, Cauthen said. 

“We start to see from the laws that were put in place way before any of us were alive, this issue started,” she said. “This segregation issue, this socioeconomic issue started back then. That is the system we are fighting in 2026.”

While affordable housing is a buzzword now, Cauthen said we have to be specific about what we mean. “Affordable housing replaced the term ‘public housing,’” she said. Public housing meant stigmatized things like poverty and racial segregation, but “those people are human,” she said. “We have to recognize that housing is a right.” 

Taylor also is an attorney with her own practice. She and her husband relocated to Wake Forest after living off Lake Boone Trail, which used to be somewhat affordable. She said Raleigh cannot ground its housing strategy in “trickle down housing.” While developers can build anything and say they are adding to the overall housing availability, there is a lack of access for those making 30% area median income or less. 

“We have decades of evidence that show that market forces alone do not adequately provide for low-wealth families,” she said. As more people move to Raleigh, the Wake County Housing Authority doesn’t have housing vouchers available to give to families.

“I’m not gonna lie, we have some really deep challenges that we are trying to get from underneath,” Taylor said. “It was so overwhelming, the agency couldn’t keep up.” 

As an estate planning attorney, Taylor said she has seen families lose their properties and thus generational wealth. There should be a moratorium on code enforcement cases in vulnerable communities, where expensive repairs on older homes can lead to loss, she said. 

Omokaiye said her D-grade stands for “the devil in the details.” As the former chair of the Raleigh Transit Authority, and now member of the planning commission, she noticed that developers have received major benefits simply from developing alongside the city’s planned Bus Rapid Transit system. 

“I knew that was the beginning of the end for us,” Omokaiye said. “It’s not just transit for transit’s sake.” As chair of the Transit Authority, she fell for the “devil in the details” in the form of the BRT’s Transit Overlay District policy, where developers can break zoning covenants for more flexibility in building. “The moment I heard that, I realized I was part of the problem,” she said. 

Omokaiye said community members need to be more organized and have stronger solidarity with each other, rather than just Black people showing up when there’s a rezoning case in Southeast Raleigh and white people only showing up when there’s a case in Oakwood. 

“If we don’t realize that all of our issues are linked, that we will either hang separately or together, but we’re gonna hang,” she said. “When you hear ‘affordable housing,’ people think low income, but we’re talking about living wage housing.” If the city wants to build more housing for firefighters for instance, they need to be paid a living wage, Omokaiye said. 

Another priority of Livable Raleigh’s is developing more “missing middle” housing for infill. That is, smaller homes like cottages, accessory dwelling units or duplexes, which add more units onto parcels. But Omokaiye said sometimes those projects can dismantle communities and the already existing affordable housing.

Rainey has been attending city council meetings since the 1960s. Some infill development has already started in her neighborhood of College Park. “The infill development has just taken over,” Rainey said, but there is little to no availability for those making 30% AMI or below. “We’ve got $800,000 townhouses in my neighborhood. I have some huge concerns. What you end up getting is crumbs off the table.” 

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