Charlotte's 2024 Housing Bond Is $5.6 Million Over. Staff Wants to Cover It From Supportive Housing, Shelter, and Innovation.
The rental housing production category of Charlotte's $100 million 2024 affordable housing bond is now $5.6 million over its allocation goal. To cover the gap, city housing staff are recommending that council pull $1 million each from supportive housing and shelter capacity, and $3.6 million from the Innovation Pilot Fund.
LaWana Slack-Mayfield warned her colleagues on the night of April 27 that "funding everything," as she put it later, could put the bond into deficit. The Housing Committee chair had moved a narrower allocation that swapped one rental project for another. A substitute motion put both projects back in. The vote carried.
On Monday morning, in Mayfield's own committee room, Rebecca Hefner walked the chair through what the deficit looks like in practice. The city's housing director described the rebalancing recommendation as a way to keep the bond's original investment goals achievable.
Mayfield, who said she met with Council Members Watlington and Driggs over three or four sessions in 2024 to set those original investment goals — sessions she described as "giving up our July, our summer vacation in '24" — told the committee she has concerns with moving money around.
"Six-plus on council makes the decision," she said, recounting the April 27 vote. "We are now here today where we're looking at a $5.6 million deficit based on what was voted upon and approved in the last allocation."
The committee took no action Monday. Hefner told them they did not have to.
What the Substitute Motion Actually Did
The arithmetic is cleaner than the politics. Council approved $26.4 million in housing trust fund allocations on April 27. Of that, $16.8 million went to the rental housing production category — which had approximately $11.2 million remaining when the round began. The overage is exactly $5.6 million.
The procedural sequence is what produced the gap. Staff had recommended Evoke Living at Willora Lake — the Crosland Southeast affiliate's 120-unit senior development on North Sharon Amity Road — at $5.85 million. Mayfield's motion deferred that project to the next funding round and substituted River District 2, a 4 percent low-income housing tax credit development in Council District 3, at $5.6 million in its place. Her stated reason was the city's commitments at the River District site dating to 2017, and unmet affordability targets as construction in that area has accelerated.
According to the April 27 council transcript, Mayfield's motion was for $20,617,000 across twelve projects.
District 1 Council Member Danté Anderson flagged the change before the second was even gaveled. "It appears that the Evoke Living at Willora Lake was not a part of your motion," Anderson said. "But it is a part of our RCA here, correct?"
Mayfield confirmed the swap. The Willora Lake developer had told the committee on more than one occasion that it would attempt two rounds of funding through the housing trust fund — Mayfield's recommendation deferred Willora Lake to that second round and put River District 2 in its place.
District 2 Council Member Malcolm Graham — chair of the Budget Committee, not the Housing Committee — made the substitute motion to put Evoke Living back in. "I clearly understand why we need to support what's happening in the River District, and I support that wholeheartedly," Graham said. "But it shouldn't be at the expense of evoke living. And is there a way for us to do both, right?"
Graham's substitute motion funded both. It received a second. It carried.
Mayfield's swap had stayed inside the rental envelope: River District 2's $5.6 million sat where Evoke Living's $5.85 million had been. Adding Evoke Living back without removing River District 2 is what produced the $5.6 million overage.
Coverage of the staff recommendation that preceded the vote walked through the original 13 projects in detail. Coverage of the 18-proposal field explains why the rental production category was the one most likely to overrun: the demand for tax-credit-leveraged multifamily was the strongest of any category in the cycle.
Staff's Plan: Take From the Categories That Did Not Overrun
What Hefner presented Monday is a balancing exercise. The 2024 bond's investment categories were set in 2024 in a series of committee meetings Mayfield, Council Member Watlington, and Council Member Driggs convened to decide where the $100 million should go. After the April 27 vote, after a $4 million staff hold for housing rehab and emergency repair, and after a $2 million hold for administration and evaluation that staff revised upward from its initial $1.6 million, the bond has a remaining unallocated balance of $8.46 million.
The staff rebalancing recommendation does not change that $8.46 million. It moves money inside the bond to make the category goals close.
| Category | Reduction | What Hefner said about it |
|---|---|---|
| Supportive housing & shelter capacity | −$1 million each | Pipeline projects "can potentially be advanced with federal funds or some combination of federal and local funds" |
| Innovation Pilot Fund | −$3.6 million | "Other than the teacher village, there's really no concrete projects or proposals in that category to date" |
Hefner offered a clear caveat on the Innovation Pilot Fund line. "We do think it makes sense to leave something in there because originally that fund was a message to the market," she said. "And so while there might not be anything concrete at this time, keeping dollars in there would retain that message to the market." Staff's recommendation leaves a residual in innovation rather than zeroing the category out.
She also offered a reason this conversation is happening this week and not two months from now. "The decision that is time sensitive is the NOAA proposals," she told Council Member Reneé Johnson. The rebalancing of the existing categories, Hefner said, "is not urgent."
Mayfield's resistance to the rebalance is concrete, not abstract. She told the committee she had recently attended the opening of Easter Homes — a supportive housing partnership with Caldwell Presbyterian. She also said another supportive housing funding request from A Roof Above is expected within roughly the next month, and flagged a separate rental housing preservation project on the horizon — an older apartment complex she did not name in the meeting.
The supportive housing pipeline staff is asking the committee to take $1 million from is the same pipeline she is being told has at least one new request inbound.
The May 26 Decision That Is Urgent
The committee spent more time Monday on what Hefner did call urgent than on what she did not. Two Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing preservation proposals are on the table: the Reserve at Waterford Lake in Council District 6 (140 units, just over $3.2 million in requested housing trust fund support, built in 1997) and Kimberly Glenn on Indowall Drive in Council District 5 (260 units, $4.8 million, built in 1986). Both are submitted by Ascent Housing, which Warren Wooten — the housing and neighborhood services staff member who introduced the proposals — described as "the number one houser" for vulnerable-population referrals the city sends out.
The two proposals together total $8.1 million. If council funds both on May 26 — the next council business meeting — and pulls the money from the $8.46 million remaining bond balance, the 2024 bond is essentially exhausted. If council funds one or neither, the rebalancing decision and the summer request-for-proposals decision both have more room to work.
That decision "would need to be made on May 26th," Hefner told the committee. The deadlines are driven by closing requirements on the underlying transactions.
The committee took no action Monday on the NOAAs either. It received the presentation and held the deliberation for council.
The Larger Conversation: A 2026 Bond, a Fee-in-Lieu That Did Not Pay, and an Idea Charlotte Has Been Told It Cannot Use
Hefner's last slide was about the next bond, not this one. The City Manager's proposed FY2027 budget released Monday evening. Public budget hearings and council straw votes happen in May. Budget adoption is in June. By the end of the May conversations, Hefner said, council will have a working sense of what the dollar amount for the 2026 housing bond will be. The committee — possibly with a second June meeting — would return to investment priorities and allocation goals in June. Final committee policy revision would land in July. Council action on the new bond's structure in September. The community awareness window before the November bond referendum opens in September and October.
That timeline matters because it is the answer to a question Council Member Johnson asked early in Hefner's presentation. Charlotte's rental affordability gap, Hefner told the committee, is approximately 42,000 units at 50 percent of area median income and below as of 2024 — a gap that prior coverage has tracked at 40,000 units and that has barely moved since 2015. "Just logically, for me," Johnson said, "it would seem like any additional funding should go toward that gap."
Hefner's response was the structural problem in one paragraph. The housing trust fund is a bond. State statute requires it to be used for capital investments. It cannot be used for rental subsidies. It cannot be used to support a household whose displacement event happens this week. Federal and local dollars handle those, through partners like Crisis Assistance and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Collaborative.
Mayfield put the same point a different way. Rental allocation per door, she said, is no longer $35,000. A few years ago it was almost $100,000. Two years later, it is over $200,000 a door. The 2024 bond's $35 million original rental envelope was meant to be generous against the cost curve council was watching. The cost curve has moved past it.
District 6 Council Member Kimberly Owens raised what may be the more politically interesting question. Charlotte received zero fee-in-lieu payments in fiscal year 2026, despite carrying roughly $16 to $18 million in fee-in-lieu commitments at the time of the meeting. The market was soft; building permits did not pull. After Hefner noted that the unified development ordinance allows several types of fee-in-lieu beyond the affordable housing line, Owens asked whether council could direct more of those receipts toward housing for a defined period of time given the gap.
"I'd really love to see a thoughtful conversation on how and whether we can direct more fee-in-lieu that we've already got going into housing for a defined period of time to really show how we're prioritizing that," Owens said.
Johnson then named the question Charlotte's affordable-housing community has been asking for fifteen years. Inclusionary zoning — the policy by which a city requires that a share of new market-rate units be priced as affordable — is, Hefner said, "not legal in North Carolina." City Attorney Andrea Leslie-Fite's office offered context: Chapel Hill and Carrboro have implemented something close to inclusionary zoning; the resulting lawsuits settled before the courts ruled directly on the legal authority. The city attorney's office position remains that pursuing inclusionary zoning without state legislative authorization would invite litigation Charlotte does not have a tested legal basis for.
Johnson asked if the committee could schedule a future meeting where the city attorney walks through what Charlotte can do with fee-in-lieu, what other North Carolina cities have done, and what creative tools remain inside the unified development ordinance.
What's in Front of Council, What's Not
The committee did not vote on the NOAAs. It did not vote on the rebalancing. It did not vote on the summer RFP. The committee can make recommendations to full council, but the binding votes happen at council, and none of them were scheduled for Monday.
Council's May 26 business meeting now carries the time-sensitive piece: whether to fund one, both, or neither of the two Ascent Housing preservation deals. The rebalancing question — whether to take $5.6 million from supportive housing, shelter, and innovation, or to handle the rental production overrun some other way — has more time. The summer RFP for any unfunded balance — typically released in late May or early June — has a little less time than the rebalancing but more than the NOAA decisions.
The biggest decision is the one farthest out. The 2026 housing bond will appear on the November ballot with a dollar amount the council will set in June. Council already rejected an early staff number — the FY2027 capital budget's initial $50 million bond figure was called a non-starter on March 23 by Graham, the same Budget Committee chair who would later move the substitute motion that overran the 2024 bond's rental allocation. Mayfield asked that night for staff to model the bond at $200 million to $300 million. The 2024 bond doubled the 2022 bond. The 2026 bond, on the path Hefner described, will be sized by the end of the May budget conversations.
What happens to the $5.6 million inside the 2024 bond is a question the council can wait on. What happens to the next bond is not.
— Jack Beckett