WILMINGTON — Affordable housing — or, more precisely, the staggering lack of it in the Wilmington area — is not a new problem. But Covid-19 has pushed the issue to the forefront.
Paul D’Angelo spent years working on affordable housing, including time spent at the Wilmington Housing Authority. He’s now the Affordable Housing & Community Development Expert in Asheville.
Below: PCD Editor interview with Paul D’Angelo, recorded in early May.
Asheville is a city that, like Wilmington, relies heavily on tourism but, unlike Wilmington, has taken progressive steps to address the housing issue, creating city-wide policies to encourage affordable housing and using incentive programs to make sure it actually happens. Meanwhile, Wilmington lags behind, having spent two years waiting for an ad hoc committee to finally create a permanent committee, a promising but ultimately bureaucratic step forward — that hasn’t really moved the ball on the issue.
D’Angelo has seen both the ineffectual response of Wilmington and the more proactive one taken by Asheville. He joins Port City Daily Editor Ben Schachtman to talk about affordable housing’s past, present, and future — and how Covid-19 has impacted the debate.
Covid-19 and Affordable Housing
As the pandemic spread, Governor Roy Cooper’s executive orders shut down much of the state’s service industry: bars, restaurants, hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors, and massage therapists. According to public health officials, these businesses run the highest risk of contagion — they’re places where people are close together, for long period of time, often in physical contact.
But they’re all places that employ some of the region’s most cost-burdened individuals, meaning those that spend over a third of their income on housing. In New Hanover County, where over half of the jobs don’t pay enough to support housing, that’s 45% of those who rent and 29% of homeowners.
Many of those people — working at many of those jobs — are in the service industry.
When that industry was shut down, the state and federal government fumbled the economic rescue. While some people had the financial reserves to wait weeks — or months — for the federal stimulus check and North Carolina’s glitch-ridden unemployment system, those in the service industry were already one or two paychecks away from missing rent.
When April 1 came, and then May 1, some landlords did their best to work with renters and, anecdotally, some larger apartment companies also worked with lease-holders. But officially, there was little discussion of pausing rent for thousands of service workers — the same workers who operate the economic engine of Wilmington, the tourism industry.
One silver lining? The precarious situation of many of these workers was undeniable — and an outpouring of support showed that people did recognize the employees behind the vibrant businesses that make Wilmington attraction to tourists and locals alike.
