A new affordable housing complex in downtown Durham will start accepting leases next week.
Renegade, a 110-unit apartment complex built on county-owned land at 335 E. Main Street offers units ranging from studio to three-bedroom. Notably, twenty-two units are available for folks making up to 30 percent of the area median income (AMI), which is about $32,000 for a four-person household. Another 68 units are set aside for folks making up to 60 percent AMI, and 20 units for folks up to 80 percent AMI. The building also includes a 757-space structured parking deck, a childcare center, and additional commercial retail space.
LSA Management, a property management company based in Charlotte, is in charge of leasing the apartments. Interested residents can submit pre-applications at a launch event hosted by LSA on May 15 at Durham Bottling Company.
It’s a milestone in an eight-year effort to take advantage of publicly owned land in order to build centrally located and sorely needed affordable housing, without the costs of buying prime downtown real estate.
In 2017, Durham County approached the UNC School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative to provide development consultation for county-owned sites on the 300 and 500 blocks of Main Street. The process involved public engagement, site analysis, planning, and a financial feasibility study.
The county entered into a development agreement with Laurel Street Residential, a development firm closely linked to LSA, and ZOM Living in 2021. Next week, everyone who was involved in supporting the construction of these vital affordable housing units can breathe a sigh of relief.
“It’s gone across three boards to bring this project to fruition, so I’m excited,” says Durham County Board Chair Nida Allam. “I’m glad that we’re at the finish line because construction costs are going up.”
Property costs have skyrocketed in the last decade, and the cost of building materials has been impacted by the COVID pandemic, global wars, and more recently, economic instability due to tariffs. Most of the new market-rate apartments constructed in the past several years were built on private land and do not include any affordability stipulations. Public-private partnerships on publicly-owned land present a rare occasion where local governments have the leverage to bake affordability into a project, as long as the political will exists.
Willard Street Apartments, an affordable housing complex near the downtown Durham transit station that opened in 2021, was a joint partnership between a mix of private developers and the city of Durham, who ponied up the land for the project. Of its 82 total units, 21 were available at the 30 percent AMI threshold.
“It’s expensive to do it downtown,”Allam says. “The only way we were able to do this is because the county put in the funding and used our own land.”
Durham County retained ownership of the land on the 300 block of Main Street and Laurel Street Residential has a ground lease in perpetuity for both the 300 and 500 affordable housing sites.
At a joint City-County Planning Committee meeting on Tuesday, local leaders discussed creating what Allam calls a “land bank,” a consolidated list of all the properties owned by the city, county, and Durham Public Schools, that would allow the three entities to better identify what land could be available for future affordable housing projects, especially land that falls along the Transit Opportunity Areas locations primed for what Commissioner Wendy Jacobs described in the meeting as “high-density, mixed-use, compact, walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented development.”
“We do have a lot of publicly-owned land and I’m not sure that’s really being focused on enough,” Jacobs said during the meeting. “But honestly, if we come up with these incredible mixed-use, dense neighborhoods and only a certain economic group can afford to live in them, then we will not have achieved our goals in our community.”
City council is approving new housing at nearly every council meeting these days (much to the chagrin of some residents), but housing supply still lags behind demand in Durham. Without building on public land or utilizing tax credits, access to affordable housing, especially at the 30 percent AMI level, will be difficult to come by for residents who most need it. Tenesha Bullock, regional manager at LSA, says the firm plans to do a lot of outreach in the coming months to ensure that the folks who qualify for the affordable units know about them and have the resources to apply.
“We’re marketing to the housing authorities, working with [North Carolina Housing Finance Agency] and their Key [Rent Assistance] program, and taking vouchers from other sources as well,” Bullock says. “We’re going to be doing a lot of marketing, catching foot traffic, passing out flyers, trying to get into areas where perhaps those people are working and letting them know we’re here.”
Laurel Street Residential and ZOM Living, a market-rate developer based in Florida, oversaw construction of the Renegade and its “sister development” on county-owned land on the 500 block of East Main Street. That project includes The Maizon, a 248-unit market-rate apartment complex, and an additional 195-unit mixed income building, which is set to begin construction this summer. Laurel Street also worked on The Joyce, a senior housing community on Morehead Avenue, and the Vanguard in East Durham near Golden Belt.
The Renegade apartment building still needs a few finishing touches so no tours of the apartments will be available at the leasing event, but the company website does include floor plans and a few photos of the units. Residents will have access to an on-site playground, fitness center, and laundry room for units without a washer and dryer hookup.
The complex is also in the heart of downtown where residents will have access to important services like transportation and health care. Renegade is near a bus stop, the county’s public health building, the downtown library and other municipal facilities. More residents downtown could also support the growing number of businesses in that area of East Main Street, like Missy Lane’s. Future residents fortunate enough to get a spot at Renegade will have downtown Durham at their fingertips.
“The location is everything,” Bullock says. “The views are amazing. I want to move into one of the units myself.”
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