Misguided is perhaps too light a word to describe the infamous Chapel Hill housing ordinance, which prevents more than four unrelated people from living in the same house. The ordinance is a feeble attempt at socially reengineering a by-gone era of the Chapel Hill housing market. The costs of this bad policy fall almost entirely on students, who the town should do well to remember are vital to Chapel Hill’s economy.
Chapel Hill didn’t exist before the University. The town was created to serve the University. While the town has certainly grown to include other constituencies, UNC remains the driving force of local growth. Enrollment is up 23 percent since 1989, meaning this year approximately 6,000 more students are living in Chapel Hill than there were 25 years ago.
Local businesses have recognized this trend and capitalized, notably burrito restaurants and housing rental companies. The Northside neighborhood is filled with students renting three-or-more-bedroom houses, and some property companies have demolished older, smaller houses and replaced them with larger ones built for students.
These new developments, seen prominently on North Columbia Street, are essentially mini-apartment buildings with a communal kitchen and living room. These houses also saw students evicted earlier this year for violating the four-person housing ordinance, leaving the evicted in housing limbo and the remaining renters with a larger monthly bill.
The ordinance doesn’t do anything to combat the supposed problem of rising rent. If a five-bedroom house and a three-bedroom house are both renting for $700 per bedroom, the rent problem isn’t exacerbated by the additional bedrooms. The problem arises when 1,000 people want to live in a neighborhood that has enough houses for 800. Some of those 1,000 would surely pay higher rent than others, an economic reality that determines who gets housing and whom gets priced out.
The defense offered for this ludicrous ordinance is that these five-plus-bedroom houses are driving up rent in the neighborhood through the ugly process of gentrification. Town Council member Donna Bell, in explaining how students all of a sudden became classified as gentry, remarked that, “A mom and a dad and two kids cannot compete with the income of four adults.”
Hopefully it’s not lost on her that a mom and dad whose combined income can’t compete with that of four students working around class schedules have much larger problems than gentrification — namely starvation. Her comments also highlight the ridiculous notion that the Chapel Hill Town Council can reverse the town’s socioeconomic trend towards higher housing prices by targeting students.
Housing prices don’t go up because hundreds of students living off of meager incomes are renting big houses for their upperclassmen years. Housing prices go up because all kinds of people are willing to pay the market price of living in Chapel Hill, a fact of life in this growing college town.
