RALEIGH – An overflow, vocal crowd reacting to the City Council’s attempt to curtail construction on most residential property across the city took council members and the Planning Commission from the drawing board to the woodshed in short order Tuesday night at a public hearing in council chambers.
In stinging rebukes to city officials’ recent march toward “smart growth” zoning, speaker after speaker told the council that the city’s plans would ruin neighborhoods and rob citizens of their most valuable asset – their homes. The crowd loudly applauded and cheered after many of the citizens’ speeches.
Obviously stunned by the strength of the opposition to the proposed rule, Mayor Charles Meeker said, “We hear you.” He promised that the council would ask the Planning Department to consider alternatives. “We do need to rethink this,” he said.
The “temporary” proposal was drawn up by the city’s Planning Department to restrict the construction of new houses that are larger than older homes in traditional neighborhoods. The new regulations would limit the height and overall size of new homes and increase setback requirements for yards.
Only a couple of speakers out of the standing-room only audience supported the restrictions.
Paul Coble, vice chairman of the Wake County Board of Commissioners, president of the North Carolina Property Rights Coalition, and a former mayor of Raleigh, told the council, “This text change is ill-conceived, ill-advised, and ill-prepared.
“It is a shameful attempt to exert your will on land-use policy by robbing the citizens of Raleigh and property owners of their property rights. You cannot thwart the laws of economics of the marketplace by placing artificial constraints on zoning ordinances any more than you can control the marketplace by government price controls, which was so ably demonstrated by President Nixon when he tried to control gas prices.
“This week all the people in this room are going to have the joy of receiving their re-evaluations from the county. What y’all do with it will be important, but if you are not careful you will find property values going up in the city and your actions may very well cause the value in people’s homes to disappear.”
Dallas Woodhouse, state director of Americans for Prosperity North Carolina, referred to the higher re-evaluations and increased value of land, rather than homes, in Raleigh. The city’s proposal would limit homeowners’ ability to replace obsolete structures with newer ones that protect home values, he said. “We ask you (the council) to move cautiously on this, and if it’s a close call, and I suspect that in many cases it is, the close call should go toward the person who is paying the mortgage.”
Another speaker, a homeowner, used the city’s new convention center as an example. “The convention center was built because of functional obsolescence,” he said. “Why not houses?”
Michael Sanera, research director and local government analyst with the John Locke Foundation and a former professor of political science, decried the mayor’s and three new council members’ “hollow” victories in the November election. The “dismally low” turnout of voters in the November election in which Meeker and three council members were elected called into question the legitimacy of the council’s move to revolutionize planning in the city, he said.
Political science research shows that off-year elections, such as the one in November, draw a small percentage of voters and are dominated by special interests, he said. “In this case,” Sanera said, “special interests turned out to vote for the mayor’s candidates who will remake the city based on their shared vision.”
Now that the mayor appears to have a majority on the council, the council will support special interests, he said. “What do these special interests want? I think they want this ordinance. And it is clear that the ordinance is designed to steal the property rights from homeowners in the city.”
“The ordinance will prevent people from living the lifestyles that they choose. This special interest is working through the city council to use government to force people to live the lifestyle that it selects,” based upon the election turnout of a tiny minority of voters, he said.
The proposal would increase setback regulations by up to 10 feet for any building on land zoned between six and 10 homes per acre. The proposed regulation also would lessen the maximum height of buildings from 40 feet to 32 feet in zoning districts that allow four to 10 homes per acre. An analysis by city planners shows that the proposed regulation would reduce the “footprint” of building on land zoned R-6, Special R-6, and R-10 by 22 percent to 28 percent.
Craig Tierney, a resident of Craig Street in Raleigh, said that people joke to him, “‘Do you own that street?’ And I laugh and say, no, I’m a little concerned now whether I own my own property.”
Tierney told the council that in the past 15 years he has witnessed a revitalization of his neighborhood. “I live in an 1,800-square-foot brick ranch,” he said, which over the years became too small to resell to most families who needed larger homes to raise their children. “This neighborhood was turning over,” he said.
Widows lived nearby and over time the neighborhood changed. “When these homes became open, what we saw in my neighborhood was either people, who like me, were single with no children would buy it because they wanted it as an investment. They didn’t want to live there. But what we noticed was that no families were buying these smaller homes.”
The families with children that did buy the smaller homes renovated and expanded the homes, he said. “When I bought my home 15 years ago,” Tierney said, “there were no children in the neighborhood, one or two perhaps.” Because of the new families moving into his neighborhood, the area now thrives with children playing in open lots and yards, he said.
In neighborhoods where families didn’t move into older homes and renovate them, Tierney said, houses became rentals. “Who is going to rent these homes? It’s college students…. There aren’t one or two college students in these homes. There are five or six college students in these homes.”
The “kegger” parties the students throw are notorious for disrupting neighborhoods, he said. “I don’t want to live in a neighborhood that has a kegger down the street.”
The regulations being considered by the council would prevent the revitalization of older neighborhoods, Tierney said, and encourage families to move out of the city.
Coble warned the council that its decision would trigger wider repercussions. “As a member of the county commission, I’ll tell y’all I’m awfully concerned about this decision because you’re going to affect people who live in the county who are in your ETJ who will have no voice in this, so I rise to speak in their place because you will make decisions that will affect their property values and their property rights also.
“Be very careful how you play with people’s property rights. For many people it’s their retirement. It is future income.”
There are people in the city who have invested in the county to provide the major income for their retirement, he said. “The changes you make may very well rob them of that. And I will tell you, the North Carolina Property Rights Coalition will probably challenge you on a constitutional basis.”
Richard Wagner is the editor of Carolina Journal.