Durham City Council member Nate Baker is absolutely right to spotlight Durham’s affordability crisis—one of the defining challenges of our time. But the policies he promotes—rent control, resistance to housing supply reforms he dismisses as “neoliberal,” demanding steep developer concessions and additional discretionary review—may inadvertently worsen the very problem he’s trying to solve. While these approaches may help a lucky few with access to designated affordable units, they risk deepening the crisis for many more.
In a city with tens of thousands of cost-burdened residents, constraining housing development constrains housing options and drives up prices. It also slows the growth of the tax base we need to fund the very things Baker calls for and we enthusiastically support: deeply affordable housing, public transit accessible to all, quality parks in every neighborhood, and stronger and more equitable public schools.
We should be transparent: we’re both homeowners in an affluent Durham neighborhood. The question before our community is whether we want to protect people like us—or build a city where everyone can thrive.
The real class war is housing scarcity
When Durham teachers earning $48,000 pay $1,600 or more in rent, that’s not market failure—it’s landlord power fueled by scarcity. Baker blames corporate greed, but the numbers tell a different story: In the past four years, Durham has added about 15,000 new homes—roughly twice what population growth alone would have required. That surge helped halt rent increases for the first time in years, but even at that pace, rents didn’t fall. To make rents affordable for working families, we need to build well beyond what’s needed to house new residents—by our calculation, tens of thousands of additional units.
While most new units are market-rate, research consistently shows they ease pressure on older, more affordable homes by offering wealthier households alternatives and freeing up existing stock. In cities like Austin, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Raleigh, large-scale construction has slowed or even reversed rent increases—with significant benefits felt at the lower end of the market.
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One year of flat rent isn’t victory—it’s just stopping the bleeding. As long as teachers are paying 40 percent of their income for housing, we haven’t solved the crisis; we’ve simply proven that building works and we must continue.
When we build at scale, landlords and developers compete for tenants and buyers. When we don’t, residents do—and those with fewer resources lose. That’s why Baker’s frequent “no” votes on new housing matter: however well intentioned, they deepen scarcity and intensify the competition that advantages the wealthy. Want to see what happens when a community chooses that path? Look 30 minutes down the road.
Chapel Hill’s cautionary tale
Baker advocates the same approach that helped transform Chapel Hill from an affordable college town into an exclusive enclave. Strict development caps, preservation rules, and endless community input processes empowered small groups to block new housing.
From 2001 to 2024, Chapel Hill issued one-tenth as many building permits as Durham, despite having a fifth of the population. This constrained construction has contributed to pushing the median home price above $640,000 in Chapel Hill, compared with $410,000 in Durham. Many essential workers now commute from counties away.
Chapel Hill got beautiful regulations—but they chose to protect existing homeowners and landlords over empowering tenants and creating a pathway for renters to purchase starter homes. The result? Scarcity became a gift to landlords. Limited supply meant landlords could charge premiums while workers were priced out. Why price units affordably when regulations guarantee that you can charge more? Recent elections suggest voters have had enough, electing a pro-housing council to reverse course. Durham shouldn’t repeat their earlier mistake.
How scarcity serves corporate power
This is the contradiction that many on the left miss: the housing policies they support don’t challenge corporate power—they enable it. Restrictive zoning and development rules advantage larger developers with experience and capability navigating them, while creating high barriers to entry for small builders and local entrepreneurs who could deliver more affordable housing.
Baker paints housing-abundance advocates as corporate shills, yet scarcity is what most benefits investors, developers, and landlords—driving up rents and home values while pricing out childcare and sanitation workers. Corporate ownership of single-family homes, often blamed for rent hikes in recent years, remains vanishingly small in the aggregate: in North Carolina it accounts for less than half of 1 percent of all homes. But in the places where it has had a significant impact—particularly in disinvested communities—it is a symptom, not the cause, of scarcity. Blackstone, the country’s largest corporate landlord, told shareholders in 2023 that “a structural shortage of housing has resulted in pricing power for rental housing assets,” investor-speak for the ability to raise rents and boost returns precisely because too few homes are available.
Reducing housing abundance efforts to “deregulation” may score progressive political points but ignores how existing regulations uphold the status quo. Corporations didn’t create our shortage by building too much—they profit from a system that prevents others from building enough.
Incremental approaches fall short or backfire
We share Baker’s desire to blunt the influence of corporate power and profit-maximizing capital in the housing market. But real tenant power doesn’t come from rationing or blocking development—it comes from abundance. Vienna’s lauded socialist housing model works not through scarcity and rent control but by building enough public and social housing to offer alternatives to the private market. We should fight for public investment at that scale.
But Durham can’t get there alone. Like every U.S. city, we lack the resources and capacity to build enough deeply affordable housing on our own. Even with a $95 million bond in 2019, Durham could only aim to support 1,600 units over five years—and that required state and federal funding.
The failed redevelopment of the 505 West Chapel Hill Street police station shows the limits of the city’s leverage to extract costly concessions from developers. For seven years, the city has controlled four acres of downtown land—and still hasn’t built a thing. Two development efforts collapsed as the city’s affordability demands grew, and construction costs surged over the course of lengthy negotiations. The latest plan would have delivered nearly 400 apartments, including affordable units and public space. Instead, the site sits vacant. Pushing for unattainable demands doesn’t deliver justice—it delivers nothing.
Each month of delay pushes more families toward impossible choices: stay near jobs and support networks, or flee for financial security.
A progressive abundance agenda
We need to organize not just for what’s ideal but for what’s possible now: strong tenant protections alongside a five-to-eight-year push to build enough housing not only to meet the demand from new residents, but to actually bend the cost curve and lower rents for existing residents.
Fortunately, we have overlooked and underutilized tools at our disposal. We can develop city- and county-owned land and establish preapproved building designs to speed construction, as Raleigh has done with ADUs and South Bend, Indiana, with “missing middle” housing. We can lobby the state to reinstate North Carolina’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, amplifying federal dollars for affordability.
New development also grows our tax base. Those revenues can help subsidize and preserve affordable units—especially for those most in need. To that end, we can also align public investment with private and nonprofit partners—including community development financial institutions—to actually get projects built. And we can leverage infrastructure investments, like the Durham Rail Trail and American Tobacco Trail extension, to capture the tax benefits of market-rate development and direct funds toward affordable housing.
The path forward
Delivering units at the scale we need won’t be easy. Interest rates are high and public-private trust has eroded after failures like the police station project. Meanwhile, other Triangle cities are moving forward.
Using these tools effectively will require focus—and we agree with Baker that local government should prioritize vulnerable residents. But meeting their needs as well as those of the broader public means faster planning, streamlined permitting, and projects completed in years, not decades. Principled proposals that can’t be delivered aren’t justice either. As election season approaches, we need to consider bold solutions that are both just and achievable. Durham’s workers can’t wait.
This is housing justice at the scale our crisis demands. If we want people to reject reactionary politics and believe in progressive governance, we have to show that it can work—for everyone, not just the few.
David Berger is an economist at Duke University. Owen Washburn is a consultant who advises state and local governments, philanthropies, and nonprofit organizations on inclusive growth.
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