There’s just something magical about a city at the water’s edge; yet that’s almost entirely lacking in the Triangle. Long ago, our cities and towns were founded away from water: Chapel Hill famously crests a hill, Raleigh infamously sits in Joel Lane’s tavern’s backyard. Durham, Cary, and Apex began as way stations at a time when railroads frequently followed ridge lines. Only Hillsborough has a (very) small slice of Eno River waterfront, which later fostered a mill.

But even all those years ago, foresighted planners laid the groundwork for the Triangle’s many miles of greenways, most of which sit within creek valleys. These greenways preserve public access to the water’s edge, but come with strings attached: the state’s riparian buffer requirements in the Neuse and Jordan Lake basins (i.e., most of the Triangle) make it nearly impossible to build anything except a trail within fifty feet of streams, lakes, reservoirs, ponds, and estuaries.

These rules are a boon to local water quality; they prevent pollutants from flowing into streams and protect aquatic habitats. However, these same rules make it nearly impossible to have a waterfront restaurant or buildings that open out onto streamside greenways.

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North Carolina Needs More Housing Options

NC is growing fast, but we’re not building enough homes that people can actually afford. Because of this, the state has a major housing shortfall. Rents and home prices keep rising, and in many communities the only homes getting built are large apartment complexes or detached suburban houses. What’s missing is the middle: smaller apartment buildings that fit into neighborhoods, support walkability, and create more family-sized homes. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to revisit outdated building rules that make this kind of housing difficult or downright illegal to construct. North Carolina now has a chance to be part of that movement. The basic idea behind single-stair buildings is simple: they’re apartment buildings, up to six stories tall, built around one main staircase instead of the (legally mandated) two. They still use modern life-safety features and, yes, they have an elevator.

What Single-Stair Housing Actually Is

For many people, the phrase “single-stair” is unfamiliar, and sounds more unusual than it really is. In cities around the world, these small to mid-sized apartment buildings are built around one protected stair. Most apartments and condominiums today are legally required to have two staircases, which leads to long hallways, minimal light, and tall towers. Single-stair apartments are modern apartment buildings: they include elevators, sprinklers, fire-rated hallways and doors, and other code-required safety features. The point of legalizing them isn’t to reduce safety. The point is to make it possible to build apartment buildings that are smaller, simpler, and better suited to neighborhoods across North Carolina’s cities and towns.

Just as important, single-stair structures allow for better homes than traditional two-stair apartment blocks. Single-stair buildings make it easier to design more family-sized apartments with two or three bedrooms, instead of forcing everyone into smaller one-sided units. Because the building is typically thinner, apartments can have windows on more than one side, which means more daylight, better airflow, and layouts that feel more livable. These quality of life advantages are one reason why single-stair reform has become such an attractive answer for housing advocates.

A Citizen-Led Effort to Raise Awareness

In late 2025, a group of North Carolina citizens, architects, builders, and policy makers got together to create singlestairnc.com. The website is designed to bring more awareness to this housing format and its benefits in North Carolina. Building code reform is not the kind of issue that gets much public attention, even though it has a major impact on what gets built and what housing options we have. The goal of the site is to make the issue easier to understand, show why it matters for affordability and neighborhood design, and give North Carolinians a way to take action.

North Carolina Is Part of a Bigger Movement

Single Stair is a nationwide movement and it’s time for North Carolina to step up. Pew Research reported that since 2022, 19 states and Washington, D.C. have introduced bills to study or allow single-stair buildings, and that seven states passed bipartisan single-stair legislation in 2025 alone. Our neighbors in Virginia already enacted a law in 2024 to study and recommend code changes for single-stair buildings. Maryland enacted a law in 2025 requiring its Department of Labor to study single-stair building code reform and report back by December 2026.

Tennessee shows just how quickly things can move once a state opens the door. Lawmakers there passed a 2024 reform allowing single-stair buildings under set safety conditions, letting cities opt in locally. By late 2025, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Jackson had all moved forward. This makes Tennessee one of the clearest examples of single-stair reform going from idea to law to on-the-ground adoption.

That momentum has continued into 2026. Rhode Island introduced a bill to allow certain residential buildings up to four stories and 16 units with a single staircase, and California lawmakers introduced a new single-stair reform bill after the state’s fire marshal study process. For North Carolina, a bi-partisan bill, SB 492, has been proposed, but it’s stuck in the Senate pending a formal review and vote.

Why This Matters Right Now

North Carolina already has a live bill on the table, but it needs public support to see it through. Senate Bill 492 was filed in March 2025 and remains referred to the Senate Rules and Operations Committee. With the General Assembly’s short session underway, lawmakers are again looking for practical ways to address the state’s housing shortage. This is exactly the kind of reform they should take seriously. It is easy to understand, limited in scope, and aimed at one clear barrier that makes small apartment buildings harder to build. Politicians often say they want housing solutions. This is one.

What You Can Do

If you want more housing options and more walkable communities in North Carolina, then check out singlestairnc.com, and come to our Single Stair Lunch & Panel at 12pm on Friday, May 1st. At this event, we’ll discuss the pathway to legalizing and constructing single-stair buildings in NC. After lunch, stick around for presentations from current NC State architecture students, who will explore how real sites in Raleigh could be transformed by single-stair developments. Students will present from 1:30-5:30pm, so stop in to look at their brilliant projects.

RSVP here

I recently visited NC State University to ask students what off-campus housing looks like for them. Most said they pay between $800 and $1,200 per month for an apartment with roommates. Even then, one student described Raleigh’s housing market as “exorbitant”.

According to Axios Raleigh, rents for student housing near NC State have increased by 30.5% since 2020. At UNC Chapel Hill, rents have risen 23.3%, compared to a 22.9% increase in market-rate apartments. Student rents around NC Central and Duke have experienced similar trends. Across the Triangle, student housing costs are rising rapidly.

This piece was written by Ka’Mya Cooper, a CITYBUILDER student fellow. Each semester, CITYBUILDER provides fellowship opportunities for aspiring student urbanists in the Triangle.

As a student at North Carolina Central University, I’ve felt the impact of this firsthand. I wasn’t able to get on-campus housing, so I had to find the next most affordable option. Off-campus housing works, but it comes with its challenges. Transportation becomes a daily concern, and being farther from campus makes it harder to be fully present as a student.

That’s why the conversation around student housing needs to shift.

Students don’t just need more housing. We need accessible housing near campus. When universities fall short on space, students are pushed into already competitive rental markets, driving prices higher for everyone and limiting options. Building more housing specifically for students can help relieve this pressure, while giving students places designed for their basic needs. Local residents can rent decent homes at more affordable prices if they aren’t competing with students for space.

Proximity also matters. Living closer to campus isn’t just about convenience; it plays a role in how students engage with their education. Shorter commutes mean fewer barriers to attending class, participating in campus activities, and accessing resources.

The takeaway is simple: Student housing is not a luxury. It’s part of the infrastructure that supports student success. As prices continue to rise across the Triangle, expanding near-campus housing will only become more urgent.

This piece was written by Ka’Mya Cooper, a CITYBUILDER student fellow and current undergraduate at North Carolina Central University.

Twelve years ago today, Kim-Mai Cutler published “How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained).”

Part flag-planting and part manifesto, it became a seminal work for the YIMBY movement and, in many ways, the first shot in the long war to reclaim American cities for the people.

Today, the piece is especially relevant to North Carolina.
Three points stand out in particular:

1. The article explains San Francisco’s severe housing shortage as the result of decades of restrictive policies and highly organized NIMBY opposition. North Carolina is earlier in that same cycle, but the political dynamics are already visible in local land use debates across the Triangle.

2. San Francisco’s crisis was driven by a shrinking supply of market-rate housing as rules limited where and how homes could be built. North Carolina is seeing similar constraints emerge through the expansion of HOA-restricted suburbia and zoning protected single-family only neighborhoods, even as demand for housing continues to grow.

3. Over time, these systems reward homeowners who benefit from limited supply and rising home values. That creates consistent pressure to oppose new housing, especially in established neighborhoods. California took this dynamic to the extreme, but the same pressures are present here, and without clear policy direction North Carolina risks following the same path.

The proper housing policy response in the Triangle today is the same as it was in San Francisco then: pragmatic, frustrated, and relentlessly focused on supply and accountability.

Many of the early wins by YIMBYs were accomplished by simply publishing the exclusionary — and often factually inaccurate — arguments made by NIMBY groups like Livable California during their policy calls. This kind of citizen journalism is only just beginning in the South, and it is long overdue. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

For too many North Carolinians under 40, housing is an existential issue.

In North Carolina, the YIMBY movement is growing for the same reasons it did in California: young people face intense housing pressure.

Housing determines whether people can stay in the communities they care about, build stability, and plan what comes next. When housing doesn’t work, nothing else really works either.

When housing is unstable or out of reach, everything else becomes harder to hold onto. People take longer to settle, stay in shared or temporary situations longer than they planned, or leave places they would have otherwise invested in. Starting a business, changing careers, or putting down roots all begin to feel riskier when the foundation is uncertain.

This is not an abstract policy debate. It is a response to lived experience. More people are recognizing that the rules shaping housing are not neutral, and that changing them is the only way to create choice and real stability.

NIMBYism is backed by trillions of dollars in U.S. home equity and by non-representative groups of homeowners who are deeply invested in protecting scarcity. But that advantage is no match for younger North Carolinians who are trying to build stable lives in the places they care about. They are living with the consequences of this system every day, and they are not going to accept it indefinitely. I choose to bet on those young people.

Kim-Mai Cutler fired the first shot in this war twelve years ago today.

Her piece starts in the middle of the chaos, but stay with it. Cutler connects the protests, the politics, and the underlying housing shortage into a clear explanation of how a crisis like this gets built over time.

Read it with North Carolina in mind.

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)

The Santa Clara Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today’s Silicon Valley. This was simply the result of bad planning and layers of leadership failure — nobody thinks farms literally needed to be destroyed to create the technology industry’s success.

Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.

The alternative — inaction and self-absorption — very well could create the cynical elite paradise and middle-class dystopia that many fear. I’ve spent time looking into the city’s historical housing and development policies. With the protests escalating again, I am pretty tired of seeing the city’s young and disenfranchised fight each other amid an extreme housing shortage created by 30 to 40 years of NIMBYism (or “Not-In-My-Backyard-ism”) from the old wealth of the city and down from the peninsula suburbs.

Here is a very long explainer. Sorry, this isn’t a shorter post or that I didn’t break it into 20 pieces. If you’re wondering why people are protesting you, how we got to this housing crisis, why rent control exists or why tech is even shifting to San Francisco in the first place, this is meant to provide some common points of understanding.

This is a complex problem, and I’m not going to distill it into young, rich tech douchebags-versus-helpless old ladies facing eviction. There are many other places where you can read that story.

It does us all no justice.

1) First off, understand the math of the region. San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city’s 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That’s about 75 percent of the city’s rental stock.)

Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply because it supports price appreciation of their own homes. It’s understandable. Many of them have put the bulk of their net worth into their homes and they don’t want to lose that. So they engage in NIMBYism under the name of preservationism or environmentalism, even though denying in-fill development here creates pressures for sprawl elsewhere. They do this through hundreds of politically powerful neighborhood groups throughout San Francisco like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Then the rent-controlled tenants care far more about eviction protections than increasing supply. That’s because their most vulnerable constituents are paying rents that are so far below market-rate, that only an ungodly amount of construction could possibly help them. Plus, that construction wouldn’t happen fast enough — especially for elderly tenants.

So we’re looking at as much as 80 percent of the city that isn’t naturally oriented to add to the housing stock.

Oh, and tech? The industry is about 8 percent of San Francisco’s workforce.

Then if you look at the cities down on the peninsula and in the traditional heart of Silicon Valley, where home-ownership rates are higher, it’s even worse.

The Google Bus protesters have said that the company should build housing on its campus, but the Mountain View city council has explicitly forbidden Google from doing just that. They’ve argued that it’s to protect the city’s burrowing owl population. (The city council even created a feral cat taskforce last week to protect the owls.)

Even more mind-bogglingly, Mountain View is discussing new office development that would bring as many as 42,550 office workers to the city. But the city’s zoning plan only allows for a maximum of 7,000 new homes by 2030.

Then, if you look at the job-to-housing ratios in some of the other peninsula cities like Palo Alto, it’s pretty terrible. Palo Alto voters just killed an affordable housing development for seniors by ballot measure last November.

So the wealthy voting classes of the peninsula are also strangling themselves of housing too. The median rent in Mountain View is $2,700 compared to $3,400 in San Francisco, according to Zillow. Once you factor in the cost of owning a car — estimated at slightly more than $9,000 a year by the AAA — it’s not that much cheaper.

If you look even closer to the Caltrain stations, rents go way up. The newly-opened Madera complex in downtown Mountain View rents out 1-bedroom units starting at $3,299 all the way up to 2-bedroom apartments at $8,000 per month.

Certain cities like Menlo Park seem more collaborative. Facebook partnered with developer St. Anton Partners to build a 394-unit complex within walking distance of its Menlo Park headquarters. But that’s 394 units for a company with more than 6,000 employees.

So one contributor to the tech industry’s spread into San Francisco is that the peninsula cities are more than happy to vote for jobs, just not homes.

2) Why is the tech industry migrating to cities anyway?

This is a demographic shift that is much larger than the technology industry itself — although there are some tech-specific reasons that have fueled a migration north from the historic heart of Silicon Valley over the last 10 years.

This is what urbanist Alan Ehrenhalt calls “The Great Inversion,” a major shift where cities and suburbs have traded places over the last 30 to 40 years. As people marry later and employment becomes more temporal, young adults and affluent retirees are moving into the urban core, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out.

San Francisco’s population hit a trough around 1980, after steadily declining since the 1950s as the city’s socially conservative white and Irish-Catholic population left for the suburbs. Into the vacuum of relatively cheaper rents they left behind, came the misfits, hippies and immigrants that fomented so many of San Francisco’s beautifully weird cultural and sexual revolutions.

But that out-migration reversed around 1980, and the city’s population has been steadily rising for the last 30 years.

This is a phenomenon that’s happening to cities all over the United States.

It’s happening in Seattle, Atlanta, New York City, Boston and Washington. D.C.:

The full article continues here.

Across Raleigh, Wake County, Orange County, and key statewide races, voters narrowed the field for November. These contests may not always draw headlines, but they determine who writes the zoning rules, transportation plans, and housing policies that shape everyday life in our cities.

Local elections are where growth becomes real. Where belonging either expands or contracts. Where we decide whether our communities will welcome new neighbors or quietly close the door.

Last night clarified the choices. November will determine the direction of the policies that shape communities across the Triangle.

Raleigh

The Raleigh At-Large Council race was the most competitive in this primary. Six hopefuls were on the primary ballot. As a non-partisan race, the top four of them will move on to the general in November: Stormie Forte, Sana Siddiqui, Clark Rhinehart, and Joshua Bradley.
The top vote-getter in the general election in November will serve a four-year term as an At-Large City Councilor and the 2nd place vote-getter will serve a two-year term as an At-Large City Councilor.

In the Raleigh City Council District C race, four candidates competed for one seat. The top two primary vote-getters, Corey Branch and Jared Ollison, will advance to the general election in November.

We’ll continue covering these campaigns and the other district races through the summer and into the fall. Click the story below to read our deeper analysis of each candidate and see how we graded them on housing.

Wake County

Wake County’s At-Large County Commissioners race also had a competitive Democratic primary, with seven candidates vying for two new seats. Authorized by the state legislature to take effect in 2026, these positions will expand the board to nine members, with the at-large commissioners representing the entire county, following a transition to district-based elections for the other seats.

With the Democratic field narrowed down, November’s race will see Democrats Christine Kushner and Mona Singh compete in the general election against Republicans Gary Hartong and Kyle Stogoski, with the top two vote-getters in the four-way race being elected commissioners.

We’ll continue covering these campaigns through the summer and into the fall. Click the story below to read our deeper analysis of each candidate and see how we graded them on housing.

Orange County

The Democratic Primary in the Orange County At-Large Commissioner race saw Karen Stegman come out on top. November’s election will see a matchup between Stegman and Republican candidate Jeffrey Hoagland.

Orange County also had two district-based commissioner races. In Orange County’s District 1, Jamezetta Bedford will be the Democratic nominee in November.

In District 2, Beth Bronson prevailed over Earl McKee by 32 votes to become the Democratic nominee.

Click the story below to read our deeper analysis of each candidate and see how we graded them on housing.

Durham

Durham does not have County Commission or City Council races on the ballot this year, but several races at the state and federal level made for an exciting primary season in Bull City (and southern Wake County).

In the congressional race between Valerie Foushee and Nida Allam, provisional primary votes are still being counted as of Wednesday, March 4th. Foushee leads by just over 1,000 votes, but this margin is slim enough that Allam is requesting a recount, according to the Daily Tarheel.

This is where the count stands as of 6:30pm on March 4th, 2026:

In the state legislative race between Sophia Chitlik and DeDreana Freeman, Chitlik won by a wide margin over the former Durham City Council member:

Other NC Primary News

There were contentious primaries throughout the state, but most eyes are on the race between Phil Berger and Sam Page. This morning, the count showed Sam Page defeating Berger by just 2 votes, with military overseas and provisional ballots still left to be counted.

While not our typical coverage, a change in state leadership would certainly have an impact on North Carolina’s housing policies. We recommend following Bryan Anderson over at Anderson Alerts to stay up to date on the latest in what is sure to be an extremely close race...

November will decide whether our region doubles down on building together or retreats into the fear of change.

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The candidates advancing from the primaries will shape zoning rules, transportation investments, and the practical choices that determine whether new neighbors can find a home here. These decisions are not theoretical. They affect rents, starter homes, small businesses, school enrollment, and whether our cities grow in ways that are resilient and welcoming.

CITYBUILDER exists to win hearts and minds, not just elections. But elections matter. Policy matters. Turnout matters.

November will not be decided by who posts the most online.
It will be decided by who organizes, who educates, and who shows up.

If you believe that everyone deserves housing choices, now is the time to act.

Support pro housing candidates.
Talk to your neighbors.
Host a conversation.
Share our coverage.
Invest in this work.
Become a member.

Growth is good. Building together is better.
Let’s make sure November reflects that.

Candidate assessments are based on candidate questionnaire responses to our housing questionnaire, other published questionnaires and public forums. Our pro-housing questionnaire was developed collaboratively with RDU New Liberals, Yes! in My Triangle YIMBYaction chapter, and Strong Towns Raleigh Local Conversation. Each group may also share candidate recommendations or endorsements.

Children assume that everyone belongs. Adults turn belonging into a policy debate.

I am raising children in Raleigh, and as I head into this primary Election Day, I keep thinking about the juxtaposition between parenting and politics.

Each morning I read about international conflict before making breakfast and packing snacks. I answer emails about zoning text while I handle school pickup. I review candidate questionnaires after bedtime.

This is how a lot of us are living right now. Big headlines. Small routines. Same day.

The national climate feels unstable. My kids have noticed too. Sometimes they ask why their classmates are afraid to come to school. Children notice. Sometimes they ask why I go speak at City Council in favor of building apartments. They notice that some adults don’t want apartments. But to kids, an apartment just means more friends on the playground. More bikes on the sidewalk. More birthday parties.

Our children assume that belonging is normal.

As adults, we turn belonging into a debate.

This debate shows up in zoning text, parking mandates, rezoning hearings. It shows up in school board meetings. In each comprehensive plan that expands housing choices or quietly narrows them.

This debate has consequences.

In Chapel Hill, leaders are considering school closures as enrollment declines after years of limited housing growth. When fewer families can afford to live in a community, classrooms empty.

In Durham, the UDO process has been stalled because of efforts to include downzoning measures, even as state law limits that authority. When we restrict housing choices, we are deciding who gets to stay and who never gets the chance to arrive.

The question of who belongs does not stay in living rooms or on playgrounds. It gets written into policy. This debate sits at the heart of our local elections.

Today is primary Election Day.

A day to decide who writes the rules. If we believe that local elections codify belonging, then primaries are where that power is first exercised.

Reminder: This year is the first time that Raleigh City Council will have a primary.

There are yard signs everywhere. People are paying attention. Early voting numbers have been strong. There is energy in the air. But March still feels early. It doesn’t carry the built-in urgency of November.

It’s easy to assume that the “real” election comes later. But in many local races, the primary effectively determines who will hold office. Primaries set direction long before November does. They decide which ideas move forward and which quietly disappear.

This is particularly true for registered voters who are not affiliated with either party; these unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans in North Carolina. If you are unaffiliated, you are not sidelined. You choose which ballot to pull. You influence which candidates move forward to November. You help shape what each party stands for locally. That is leverage.

Particularly on Election Day, we must remember that housing policy is not owned by one party. Pro-housing leadership exists across the political spectrum, but it doesn’t advance by accident.

Housing policy only progresses when voters elevate candidates who understand that welcoming new neighbors strengthens our cities. Pro-housing politics is about neighborhoods. It’s about whether they grow, stagnate, exclude, or welcome. Political parties may list every candidate under the same banner. That does not tell you how they’ll vote on housing. Labels are not land use policy. So, if housing matters to you, look beyond the labels.

That’s why we created our housing report cards.

We hope you’ll use them to understand who supports expanding housing choices and who does not.

If you’re reading this, you likely already have a plan to vote.

Today, do one more thing.

Send the housing report cards to one person who hasn’t voted yet.
Text a neighbor.
Forward this email.
Ask them who they believe should define belonging in this city.

Because that’s what today is about. Who defines belonging. Who decides whether there is room for new neighbors.

Many of us are voting while juggling childcare and other responsibilities. Many of us are thinking about the kind of city our children will inherit. Not out of panic, but out of stewardship.

Good housing policy is at the core of that stewardship. So, think about the types of policies and candidates our children would understand. Because children assume that belonging is normal. Let’s make sure our policies do too.

Vote today!

The polls are open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. EST on Election Day.

Find your polling place here.

Jenn Truman is a young designer, leader, and advocate based in Raleigh, she is embedded in the local community through both her professional and volunteer work. Jenn is a regular contributor to and Founder of CITYBUILDER.

North Carolina’s cities are expanding, yet most new housing today remains clustered at two extremes: very low-density subdivisions or large multifamily apartment towers. Neighborhoods do not have a way to add smaller, mid-scale buildings that would fit comfortably within existing blocks. This missing segment limits infill development, reduces feasible housing sites, and restricts architectural and urban design options.

Other American cities have begun filling this gap by reforming their building codes to allow single-stair multifamily buildings above three stories. These policies enable mid-rise buildings on smaller lots while applying clear safety measures, including sprinkler systems, two-hour stair enclosures, strict distance limits from unit doors to exits, and reduced floor areas.

This article compares the various technical requirements adopted by jurisdictions across the country, and evaluates how NC Senate Bill 492 would place North Carolina within this national trend. The objective is to provide a structured view of what works, what varies, and how these lessons can inform a safe and functional approach for the state.

Senate Bill 492: NC’s Single-Stair Building Code Reform

To put it simply, SB 492 would amend the North Carolina State Building Code to authorize a single stairway to be used as means of egress in certain multifamily residential buildings. The bill would allow for buildings up to 8 stories total and 7 stories above the grade plane to have only one exit staircase. This amendment stipulates a variety of safety measures for the several different configurations of single-stair buildings:

• Mid-rise buildings, which would be up to 8 stories and no more than 7 stories above grade would have the strictest restrictions: no more than four apartment units per floor, fire ratings of 2-hour fire-resistance for the egress staircase, and an NFPA 13 rated sprinkler system throughout the building.

• Low-rise buildings, which would be up to 3 stories and no more than 2 stories above grade, would not allow more than six units per floor and would require either a 1-hour fire-resistance construction OR an NFPA 13 sprinkler system.

• There are other requirements that apply to buildings of both heights, such as requiring exits to either lead directly outdoors, or be pressurized. Additional measures mandate maximum travel distances from the unit’s door to the building exit, and other egress path requirements designed to keep people safe.

  

Single-stair buildings provide the opportunity for small lots or infill lots to be used for a mid-sized form of residential development. However, the International Building Code doesn’t permit the construction of single-stair apartments, citing outdated fire safety concerns. In reality, single-stair buildings have similar fire safety statistics to other building types. Many states that have legalized single-stair buildings have implemented other fire safety regulations, requiring sprinkler systems, or implementing a maximum distance from fire exits.

There’s a wave of single-stair legislation across the U.S., so how can interested municipalities enact safe policies based on what has worked in other locations?

What’s Legal in North Carolina Today?

Currently, North Carolina, along with the majority of other U.S. states, follows the International Building Code (IBC) when determining code restrictions for construction of residential dwellings. Here are the key takeaways of what’s legal right now in regards to single-stair construction:

These rules only apply to small residential buildings with low occupant loads, such as condos, townhomes, single-family homes, or apartment buildings. Currently, buildings 4 stories or higher with 4 or more units per floor are not permitted under the IBC (without amendments to local code language).

Single-Stair Legislation Across the Nation

A number of jurisdictions in the United States have already passed bills to legalize small-scale apartment buildings with a single exit stairway. Below, we compare what single-stair legislation in other American cities allows, and where NC’s proposed SB 492 fits in.

Here are some key takeaways from the chart:

1. Single-stair buildings are all sprinklered. All cities and states that have adopted single-stair buildings require sprinklers throughout the entire structure to improve safety precautions. This is different from townhomes and single-family homes, which usually don’t require sprinklers due to their small scale.

2. Construction materials determine how tall a single-stair building can be. “Construction type,” which refers to the material makeup of a building structure, determines how flammable the building is in the case of a fire. More flammable building types can be restricted to lower floor allowances and shorter heights to improve safety.

3. Single-stair laws increase the required fire rating of stairwells. The IBC requires the walls of emergency exit stairwells in non single-stair buildings to be 1-hour fire rated. Many single-stair laws require stairwells in single-stair buildings to be 2-hour fire rated, increasing the protection of occupants exiting the building.

4. Allowed egress distances are shorter in single-stair construction. Most single-stair laws restrict the distance from unit doors to stairwell doors to 20 feet or less, and restrict overall egress distances to 125 feet or less. This 20 foot unit door to stairwell distance is drastically shorter than the 125 feet that the IBC allows for standard apartment buildings. By minimizing travel distances inside the building, single-stair apartment laws reduce the time during which occupants could inhale smoke as they navigate through a hallway to the stairwell.

5. Floor area and units per floor are limited in single-stair buildings. Most single-stair laws limit the number of units per floor to four units, lessening occupant loads on the exit staircase and preventing crowding in the event of an emergency.

We often think that adding more stairs to apartment buildings makes them safer, yet existing requirements are quite unspecific when it comes to large-scale, double-loaded corridor buildings. This makes the occupant load per staircase significantly higher in large apartment complexes compared to single-stair apartments.

Single-Stair Buildings Make Better Public Spaces

When we walk down the street in American cities, we’re often greeted by walls of concrete, private storefronts, and parking garages. These building forms discourage connection and walkability; they shove people next to roads and don’t provide the opportunity to wander through plazas, gardens, and passageways.

European cities often have small pedestrian pathways that wind through buildings and courtyards, opening up to gardens, patios, plazas, or small shops. This promotes walkability and connection through place-making; it gives people a sense of wonder and discovery during their walk, while providing moments of pause throughout the journey to rest or explore.

Single-stair buildings provide an opportunity to create these semi-public plaza or garden spaces. The arrangement of the buildings allows for a shared “backyard”, where all residents can partake in a peaceful outdoor area. Connected sidewalks allow neighbors to access these spaces, similar to a neighborhood park, yet all residents are in walking distance.

Lessons from Denver & NYC

A number of cities have seen a tremendous amount of success allowing single-stair apartment buildings in their local code. Here are a few of their experiences:

Denver

Use of an occupant evacuation elevator provides additional means of egress, while maintaining the effectiveness of single-stair buildings. An elevator must be included in the building per the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), and one prototype building has found a way to make better use of that valuable space.

NYC

New York City’s unusually high height limits for single-stair buildings allow developers to meet market-rate demand while preserving open space and traditional urban fabric.

North Carolina is Ripe for Reform

Single-stair reforms across the country demonstrate that mid-scale multifamily housing can be legalized while preserving clear life-safety standards. Although each jurisdiction uses different thresholds for height, floor area, and construction type, the most common elements are consistent. Buildings are fully sprinklered. Egress paths are short. Stair enclosures receive higher fire-ratings. Unit counts per floor are capped. Together, these rules form a predictable and enforceable framework.

North Carolina’s proposed Senate Bill 492 follows this general structure, but its story height limits and construction-type allowances place it among the most ambitious reforms. As cities in the state evaluate the bill, the experiences of places like Seattle, New York City, Denver, Nashville, and Baltimore offer useful guidance. Their policies show what has worked, what has required adjustment, and how regulators have balanced safety with the need for new housing forms.

As advocates for our local municipality, we support the push to make single-stair housing legal, safe, accessible, and affordable to all cities in the United States (and Canada!). The same places that we take our families to visit on vacation can exist here: walkable, comfortable neighborhoods, with destinations and moments of wonder all throughout the journey.

Julie Powers is a Bachelor of Architecture Student at NC State University, with an LAEP minor. Additional graphic and illustration support was provided by NC State Undergraduate College of Design in Architecture major Brenna Belcher.

Every election shapes the kind of region we live in.

But primaries are where the direction is set.

As we wrote in Every Vote Builds a City, local races determine whether we expand housing choices and welcome new neighbors or retreat into scarcity and rising costs. That is why we are grading candidates on housing.

For this round, we focused on the most competitive, contested at large primary elections where the outcome will shape housing policy in the general election and beyond. Uncontested races and jurisdictions without competitive municipal primaries will be covered in our general election guide later this summer. Durham does not have competitive municipal primaries this cycle, so we are providing commentary on relevant statewide races that directly affect local housing policy.

We evaluated candidate questionnaires and public records for consistency, urgency, and clarity of support for expanding housing supply, affordability tools, and zoning reform. Housing is the defining issue of this election cycle.

So, who made the grade?

Raleigh

The Raleigh At-Large Council race is the most competitive in this primary. With Jonathan Lamber-Melton running at the County level, there is an open at-large seat and a six-way competition for the two at-large seats on Council.

We’ll be back to cover the district races before the general.

Click the story below to read our deeper look at each candidate and why they earned their grade.

Wake County

Wake County At-Large County Commission seats also have a competitive primary, with seven candidates vying for just two new seats. Authorized by the state legislature to take effect in 2026, these positions will expand the board to nine members, with the at-large commissioners representing the entire county, following a transition to district-based elections for the other seats.

Click the story below to read our deeper look at each candidate and why they earned their grade.

Orange County

The Orange County Commissioner race is smaller in scale but still consequential for housing policy. With one at-large seat open and a competitive primary field, voters will help determine whether the County continues to advance zoning reform and affordable housing investments or slows that progress.

Orange County’s political landscape can be resistant to growth, which makes clarity and leadership on housing especially important in this race.

Click the story below to read our deeper look at each candidate and why they earned their grade.

Durham

Durham does not have County Commission or City Council races on the ballot this cycle, so we are not issuing local report cards here. However, several competitive Democratic primaries at the federal and state level will directly shape housing policy that affects Durham residents.

In the congressional race between Valerie Foushee and Nida Allam, both candidates have articulated pro-housing priorities. Foushee identifies housing and community development as key issues and has supported federal funding for affordable housing and community investment. Allam, during her time as Durham County Commissioner, has emphasized eviction prevention, affordable housing investment, and housing access as central components of economic equity. While the candidates differ on other policy areas, both recognize that housing affordability and stability require sustained public investment and policy attention.

The state legislative race between Sophia Chitlik and DeDreana Freeman presents clearer contrasts on housing. Chitlik has centered housing policy early in her legislative tenure and has sponsored bills in her first term. Freeman previously served on Durham City Council and received a D in our last local housing scorecard based on her record at the time, including her vote against Durham’s most recent affordable housing bond. Read that prior evaluation here. State lawmakers shape zoning authority, housing finance tools, tax credits, and subsidy programs that directly affect Durham’s ability to build and preserve homes.

Federal and state races can be housing races too, and the outcomes this cycle will influence the policy environment Durham operates within for years to come.

The candidates who advance from these primaries will shape what appears on your ballot this fall and the policy direction our region takes for years to come. If we want cities that say yes to homes, yes to neighbors, and yes to abundance, this is where it starts.

The report cards tell that story at a glance. Read the grades.

Share them with a friend or neighbor who cares about affordability and growth. Ask candidates where they stand.

And make a plan to go vote!

Every vote builds a city.

These assessments are based on candidate questionnaire responses to our housing questionnaire, other published questionnaires and public forums. Our pro-housing questionnaire was developed collaboratively with RDU New Liberals, Yes! in My Triangle YIMBYaction chapter, and Strong Towns Raleigh Local Conversation. Each group may also share candidate recommendations or endorsements.

The Orange County At-Large Commissioner race features two Democratic candidates competing in the primary. There is no Republican primary contest for this seat, meaning the outcome of the Democratic primary will largely determine the direction of the race heading into November. We’ve graded all three candidates across both parties.

County leadership plays a critical role in affordable housing investment, development review processes, land use coordination, and homelessness response across Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough. We believe housing is the measure of whether our leaders are ready to welcome growth and build a more affordable future.

We evaluated candidates based on their support for expanding housing supply, strengthening affordability tools, improving predictability in development processes, and addressing housing stability countywide. Below is our full breakdown of each candidate and why they earned their grade.

Karen Stegman (Dem) earns an A for her demonstrated pro housing leadership and policy depth. As a former Chapel Hill Town Council member, she played a leading role in advancing zoning reform, reducing lot size barriers, streamlining development review, and approving $25 million in affordable housing bonds. She pairs supply expansion with strong affordability tools, including inclusionary zoning, land trusts, eviction prevention, and property tax relief. In a political climate where density often faces resistance, her consistent support for infill and mixed income development reflects meaningful leadership on Orange County’s housing challenges.

Adam Beeman (Dem) earns a C. He supports additional housing types, by right permitting in designated growth areas, and infrastructure aligned development. However, his answers remain general and emphasize caution and context sensitivity over clear production targets or demonstrated reform leadership. Addressing Orange County’s housing shortage requires detailed, actionable commitments, and we did not see that level of specificity reflected here.

Jeffrey Hoagland (Rep) earns an F. While he responded to our questionnaire, his housing platform centers almost entirely on expanding single family homes and suburban sprawl, opposes recent pro housing zoning reforms, and rejects public subsidy tools. He does not support expanding missing middle or multifamily housing options. We did not see a housing strategy that meaningfully addresses Orange County’s housing shortage.

Transparency matters.

These assessments are based on candidate questionnaire responses to our housing questionnaire, other published questionnaires and public forums. Our pro-housing questionnaire was developed collaboratively with RDU New Liberals, Yes! in My Triangle YIMBYaction chapter, and Strong Towns Raleigh Local Conversation. Each group may also share candidate recommendations or endorsements.

We encourage you to read each candidate’s full questionnaire responses and public statements before voting.

Candidates who did not respond are noted above; grades reflect publicly available records.

Housing decisions shape affordability, neighborhood stability, and whether our communities welcome new neighbors. Share this guide with a friend, ask candidates where they stand, and make your plan to vote.

We begin Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson not with policy, but with a morning.

“You open your eyes at dawn. You turn in the cool bed sheets.

A few feet above your head, on the top of your roof, a layer of solar panels is blinking in the sun.

Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources.

Towering wind turbines to the east.

Small nuclear power plants to the north.

Deep geothermal wells to the south.

Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with jewels dredged out of coal mines and oil pits.

They mined rocks and burned them. Coating their lungs in the byproducts. They encased their world, your world, in a chemical heat trap.

Today that seems barbaric.

You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can barely find it on your monthly bill.

The year is 2050.”

The opening chapter reads like science fiction, but it is grounded in engineering, economics, and policy pathways that already exist. It is not escapism. It is orientation.

Klein and Thompson continue, describing “clean and clear” water piped in from desalination plants that provide “half of the country’s used fresh water,” allowing “previous parched cities to erupt with green foliage.” Fruit and vegetables are “Shipped from a farm mere miles away.” Crops grow vertically rather than horizontally, freeing up land once constrained by sprawl and scarcity.

“When your parents were young, nearly 25% of all global land was used to raise livestock for human consumption. That is unimaginable now. Much of that land is rewilded.”

And then this quiet but profound line:

“The world has changed. Not just the virtual world, that dance of pixels on our screens. The physical world, too.”

For those of us in CITYBUILDER; across real estate, municipal leadership, design, advocacy, and civic process, we know the mechanics. We understand pro formas, zoning text, comprehensive plans, bond cycles, elections, and public comment periods. We know the friction. We live inside the “how.”

But before the how, there must be a horizon.

Abundance asks us to sit, just for a moment, inside a fully realized physical future. To consider energy that is clean and inexpensive. Housing that is attainable. Food that is local. Land that is restored. Infrastructure that serves human flourishing rather than merely managing decline.

Scarcity, as the book suggests, is often constructed; not only through limited resources, but through limited imagination and procedural inertia. Thus, scarcity becomes embedded in policy, in timelines, in the stories we tell about what is possible.

What would shift if those of us shaping the Triangle oriented first toward abundance? Toward creativity anchored in feasibility. Toward innovation paired with implementation, and growth that is generous rather than extractive.

This conversation is especially timely as Raleigh reevaluates its comprehensive plan and Durham advances updates to its development frameworks. These decisions will influence housing supply, cultural vitality, environmental performance, and economic resilience for decades to come.

At our book club on February 25th, we will gather not simply to critique systems, but to reflect more spaciously:

What is the physical world we are trying to build?

What would abundance look like in our neighborhoods, our projects, and our policies?

What would need to change (procedurally, politically, personally) to move toward abundance?

We invite professionals, public servants, developers, advocates, creatives, and community members of all perspectives to join us.

Bring your questions.

Bring your reflections.

Bring your vision.

RSVP here

Join CITYBUILDER Book Club

📘 Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein
📅 Wed Feb 25th 12:00pm - 1:00pm
📍 PRESS Coffee Crêpes Cocktails
400 Hillsborough St suite 108, Raleigh, NC 27603, USA
👉 RSVP here

Come for the ideas. Stay for the people who want to build a Triangle where everyone has a place to live. We’ll see you there.

Hannah Moell is a housing advocate, market researcher, and multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges data and design with emotional resonance. Through her research with BSB Design, she explores how residential architecture can respond to shifting demographics, economic pressures, and the human need for belonging. At the intersection of strategy and soul, Hannah’s work seeks to shape housing that is not only innovative and attainable, but deeply life-enhancing.

This is part 2 in a series originally published on Greater Greater Washington that discusses how making it easier to build more, smaller houses in the Washington, D.C. area would bring down home prices and help revive the starter home. Read part 1: “How Re-Legalizing Starter Homes Cuts New House Prices.”

Legalizing “missing middle housing” allows homebuilders to “make it up on volume”: sell a higher volume of units, each at a lower price, by lowering the cost of inputs per unit. Those lower costs come from both dividing land and materials between multiple units, and building smaller units that use fewer materials.

Much has been written about how Houston reduced minimum lot sizes, spurring a wave of moderately-priced townhouses. Yet the city’s famously unusual land use regulation may make comparisons difficult. Instead, let’s look at three growing (but conventionally zoned) cities that have recently changed their zoning codes to allow smaller houses and seen homebuilders respond with hundreds of new, lower-priced homes.

Petite prices in Portland

In 2021, Portland passed a controversial zoning reform called the Residential Infill Program, or RIP. In 2022, it followed with “RIP2,” which ended the city’s 1950s minimum lot size rules. This allowed homebuilders to profitably build smaller houses on smaller lots that sell for less money, and builders enthusiastically constructed “starter homes”, lower in both square footage and price.

Builder magazine profiled homebuilder Eric Thompson, who pivoted his business from Oregon HomeWorks, which sold million-dollar teardown mansions, to Snug Homes, which sells cottages and townhouses at half the price. Despite cutting prices, Thompson “is seeing the same profit margins as before but on more revenue, resulting in a healthier bottom line.”

A recent city report reviewing RIP’s effects included this pair of graphs, showing new house prices and sizes in established Portland residential neighborhoods in 2024. Detached houses on conventional lots (which were legal before RIP) are shown on the left, and denser “middle housing” (which was legalized by RIP) on the right.

In the construction industry, more money buys more houses. After all, “price per square foot” is a common unit price for homebuyers. Yet even for conventionally sized houses, the demand is greatest for smaller and cheaper units; note that the house dots on the left graph cluster around 1700 square feet and $600,000. However, this demand hits a wall: it’s difficult to sell a new house on a conventional Portland lot for less than $500,000.

What’s surprising is the graph on the right, which shows that the RIP zoning changes resulted in many new, smaller units that actually sold for less: “In 2023-24, the average sales price of a new market-rate middle housing unit was about $250,000 to $300,000 less than that of a new market-rate single detached house, mostly due to size difference.” Nearly all new houses on unconventional lots sold for less than $500,000, the citywide median house price.

As homebuyer Josie Cantu enthused to NBC News, “these kinds of buildings being put in place opens up so much opportunity for people like myself.” Many of the new middle houses are even priced low enough to qualify for pre-existing affordable homeownership programs, greatly expanding those programs’ reach and making homeownership more attainable for middle- and moderate-income Portlanders.

Another finding of the city’s report is that there has not been a significant increase in residential demolitions. The pace of demolitions has remained roughly steady, but the city now sees twice as many units built per demolition.

Durham bent the curve

Similar zoning rules enacted in 2019 also re-legalized the starter home market in Durham, North Carolina. Local homebuilder Aaron Lubeck writes in Southern Urbanism that “the most unprecedented and transformative reform in EHC [Expanded Housing Choices] is the introduction of the Small Lot Code,” which allowed existing city lots to be subdivided for small houses on small lots, and effectively allowed new houses on what were previously unused back yards and front yards.

The Small Lot Code was quickly embraced by builders. By 2022, small lots accounted for the majority of new-construction houses sold in central Durham. It’s no surprise that they’re popular: some new small-lot houses sell for less than $300,000, compared to the city median of over $400,000. Lubeck points out that the explosion of new small houses caused new-home sales prices citywide to plateau in 2022, even as prices in neighboring Raleigh and Chapel Hill (as well as nationally) continued to climb.

Recent sales near the corner of Hanover and Drew streets, one mile from the center of Durham, illustrate how small lots have transformed the city’s new housing market and created more housing choices. These sales include:

• a new, large detached house for $915,000;

• a new, mid-sized four-bedroom house for $515,000;

• a new small, two-bedroom house for $345,000; and

• an older house for $362,000.

The $345,000 two-bedroom house (effectively an accessory dwelling unit sold separately) is comparable in price to the nearby $362,000 house from the 1950s, but with the advantages of new construction (better efficiency, more usable interiors, and newer systems). That price was possible because they split a large lot which contained $515,000 houses in front. Together, the $515,000 and $345,000 houses add up to $860,000 of housing on one lot. This is about as much as the $915,000 new house on a full-sized lot a block away, but divided such that two families can combine their purchasing power to buy that one city lot.

Twins win in Raleigh

Durham’s success later inspired the city council down the road in Raleigh to approve two broad zoning text changes in 2021 and 2022 that have been among the most productive “missing middle housing” reforms in America, with nearly 4,000 formerly impossible units permitted to date.

One of the most notable early changes was allowing duplexes on every residential lot, a change urged by city councilor Jonathan Melton: “If someone can build a mansion next to my house and I have no say…because that’s their property and that’s allowed by right, why do I have to weigh in if someone can build a duplex or a quad or some townhomes? What message are we sending about the types of people that live in big, single-family, expensive homes, and the types of neighbors we welcome into multifamily living?”

The results were very quickly seen in neighborhoods which were already experiencing teardowns and mansionization. Because duplexes can be built and permitted almost exactly like detached houses, some teardowns that had already happened went back and reapplied for permits as duplexes instead.

On Sheffield Road in East Raleigh, a few blocks from where I went to high school, two neighboring new houses sold in 2024. On one side, a new four-bedroom detached house sold for $865,000; next door, a four-bedroom duplex unit sold for $660,000 (over $200,000 cheaper). The duplex even sold at a lower price per square foot than the $585,000 “fully-renovated with designer upgrades” 1955 four-bedroom across the street.

The same math could work in Greater Washington

The experience of cities like Portland, Durham, and Raleigh shows that in the real world, zoning that encourages small houses on small lots also results in small price tags. They have quickly cut the cost of new houses by hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting new houses in close-in, transit-rich neighborhoods within reach of middle-income and even moderate-income households.

The effects are clear in Arlington, where courtroom battles over the “Expanded Housing Choices” zoning reform have resulted in a few projects moving forward and others reverting to conventional teardowns. The first new duplex units to deliver under the new zoning are priced a full one million dollars less than new detached houses on sites where developers had pursued attached houses.

These cities have found that small lot houses cumulatively save local residents millions of dollars, make existing housing subsidies go further, do not threaten “neighborhood character” with additional demolitions, and cost local governments almost nothing. These homes’ lower prices make them more resilient to fluctuating interest rates.

Instead, Greater Washington’s jurisdictions have deemed the vast majority of the region’s neighborhoods off-limits to small lots and small houses. Instead of listening to a handful of “supply skeptics” who refuse to believe that homebuilders will sell less land for less money, local governments everywhere should make better choices and legalize more housing options in more neighborhoods.

Payton Chung, LEED AP ND, is a developer and author who writes about the interrelated crafts that build cities: architecture, development, finance, landscape, planning, and transportation. He has written for the Urban Land Institute, Greater Greater Washington, the American Institute of Architects, Streetsblog, and the Congress for the New Urbanism. He is a Cary native and currently working on transit-oriented residential developments in the Triangle region of North Carolina.

There are parts of the Triangle that are, by all accounts, known for their dynamism and growth. From large towns like Morrisville and Apex to small ones like Pittsboro and Wendell, these places have embraced a future in which their communities will be much larger, in terms of population and even geography, than they are today.

And then there are communities like Carrboro and Chapel Hill, which long ago decided that they’ve had enough change. With backing from anti-growth activists, elected officials in both towns worked with Orange County to set a growth boundary (which they call the “rural buffer”) in the 1980s, with the promise that the communities would continue to build all the housing they needed. Unsurprisingly, those same anti-growth activists then worked to block almost all new housing proposed in the towns.

Since that time, change in Chapel Hill and Carrboro has largely followed the same script. A developer proposes a project, anti-growth activists seek to block it, and the council decides its fate. This is the story for projects big and small, which is one reason why new construction (especially in Chapel Hill) looks like it was built without much thought to planning. This dynamic is also a major contributor to Chapel Hill’s high housing costs (the median home cost is $620k), particularly when compared to its neighbors ($394k in Durham, $427k in Raleigh).

But this pattern is about to change. Carrboro and Chapel Hill are poised to improve how growth happens in southern Orange County. For the first time in two generations, their councils are embracing zoning reforms that will make it possible to build small infill housing, not just McMansions or five-over-one podium apartment buildings. Here’s what to watch for in 2026.

Carrboro wants to grow. For real.

Since its adoption of a pro-growth comprehensive plan in 2022, Carrboro has been hard at work on implementation, including a complete rewrite of its unified development ordinance (UDO) that’s currently underway. Normally we’d expect Carrboro to follow Chapel Hill’s lead and take a decade (or more) to implement its plan, but there are three reasons to be optimistic about the current progress:

1. Carrboro’s town council supports growth. In 2023, pro-growth candidates defeated those who were more skeptical of policies to increase housing. In 2025, the last remaining member of the old guard, Randee Haven O’Donnell, declined to run again. The three candidates running for election, along with the mayor, all spoke in favor of implementing the 2022 comprehensive plan.

2. Carrboro recently hired a new planning director, John Fussa, who has experience planning in communities that want to accommodate more housing and more neighbors.

3. Finally, the new Carrboro town council showed that it means to carry out its comprehensive plan when it voted in November to adopt the Carrboro Downtown Area Plan. The downtown area plan thinks expansively, incorporating nearby neighborhoods that will eventually become part of downtown, and imagining taller buildings of varying sizes throughout the space. The plan supports a future Carrboro that will be more vibrant and accessible than it is today.

Carrboro’s town council will continue to discuss its zoning code rewrite throughout the year, although it’s unclear when they plan to take a vote. But in all likelihood, the current council will adopt the new zoning code, a significant upgrade from what we have now.

Chapel Hill is inching toward real change

If Carrboro has been sleepy for decades, Chapel Hill has been growing in fits and starts due to its process-first approach to housing. The town spent most of the 2010s fighting about its future. In 2014, a pro-growth mayor passed a form-based code, but it only applied to the area now known as “Blue Hill.” That small section of town has added more than 2,000 homes since, which is almost one tenth of all the housing that currently exists in Chapel Hill. Despite this success, “Blue Hill” helped bring about an anti-growth backlash that halted any further attempts to update the town’s zoning code.

Until now. Starting in 2021, pro-growth council members began winning seats and building a fragile majority committed to reform. That same year, town staff commenced what became a five year effort to rewrite Chapel Hill’s Land Use Management Ordinance (LUMO). After hitting a snag with consultants, staff started the process over last January, but promised it would only add an extra six months to the timeline.

Meanwhile, staff presented (on council’s request) a series of text amendments that are expected to make it dramatically easier to build infill housing in Chapel Hill if passed. Among other things, the text amendments will:

• Eliminate the requirement that developers present “concept plans” before they bring a project to council

• Eliminate parking minimums townwide

• Change subdivision rules to make it easier to build small homes on small lots

• Reduce lot sizes and set backs across most zoning districts

• Legalize zero-frontage and flag lots

• Legalize shared driveways

• Change rules to encourage the construction of ADUs and duplexes townwide, including the elimination of floor area ratio restrictions for duplexes.

This package of text amendments was not adopted when it came up for a vote in November. In part, this was due to the fact that Karen Stegman, a pro-housing council member, resigned in June, leaving just four reliable pro-housing votes on the council (five votes were needed to pass the amendments). Ordinarily, council holds a work session in advance of votes of this magnitude, but this didn’t happen, which meant that council did not have an opportunity to discuss the proposal in detail.

At the November 21 meeting, council member Amy Ryan proposed a series of amendments to the amendments, most of which aimed to scale back the original reform package. For example, Ryan proposed an amendment that would make concept plan reviews optional, rather than eliminating them entirely. Other council members argued that this optional process would become a de facto requirement, particularly if council rejected a proposal that did not go through concept plan review. The council deadlocked on Ryan’s amendment, after which she suggested that the entire package might fail that night.

From there, council members debated Ryan’s other amendments, discussing topics such as the optimal size of duplexes and the ideal number and location of off-street parking spaces. At the end of the night, the reform package failed, which pushed the vote to January, when two new members (both more favorable to housing) would join the council. Soon after the November meeting, council member Theodore Nollert said he planned to propose an amendment to legalize triplexes and quadplexes in the town.

At a work session on January 7, the new council expressed support for retaining several elements of the staff proposal that had been on the brink of elimination in November. For example, council members gave support to the elimination of concept plans, and the retention of the 5,000 square foot maximum for duplexes. Ryan had proposed dropping the maximum to 3,600 square feet, a slight increase from the current 2,500 square foot max that has proven insufficient to attract new builds.

Throughout the meeting, council discussed many of the age-old issues that impact Chapel Hill: the high cost of housing, the presence of students, and the trouble with parking. But two new voices, council members Louie Rivers and Wes McMahon, made the conversation more convivial than it had been in the past.

Town staff noted that Nollert’s proposal to legalize triplexes and quadplexes would need to go through a new process, which would take several months. Staff also suggested that they will soon begin the adoption process for their LUMO zoning code rewrite, with a vote coming as early as June.

In either case, we hope that the council continues to push for reform. For example, legalizing single-room occupancy apartments (basically dorms for adults) would help people who need safe and small housing near campus. Likewise, the council could look at removing obstacles to building townhomes. To top it all off, we’d love to see council members host a design competition to encourage homeowners and builders to take advantage of the town’s new rules. If you have ideas for the council, or just want to encourage them to pass the text amendments, please write to them here.

Will Chapel Hill and Carrboro lead the way on better zoning?

For decades, our highest growth communities have also been the ones furthest from services and jobs. Suburban sprawl is subsidized in a thousand ways, and our zoning and building codes encourage it. Infill is more complex than single-family housing (technically, politically, and economically), but much more important, as it makes our communities sustainable and resilient.

While Chapel Hill and Carrboro were once poster children for the anti-growth agenda, we’re beginning to witness a change. From accessory dwelling units and duplexes to cottage courts and small apartment buildings, southern Orange County is set to see a renaissance of new building types, all thanks to councils that can see a future more prosperous, diverse, and exciting than the present.

Our pro-housing councilors shouldn’t be afraid to take the actions they know are needed to secure more homes in our communities. In turn, those same pro-housing council members need support from their constituents and neighbors who understand the benefits of more housing. Not just on election day, but in their inboxes and at those long council meetings in which they’re envisioning what their communities could look like decades from now. Chapel Hill and Carrboro are closer than they’ve ever been to realizing a future in which housing is plentiful. It’s up to us to make sure that our elected officials know just how important it is to build a place for everyone.

Martin Johnson is a housing advocate based in Chapel Hill. This is his first column for CITYBUILDER.

If it feels too early to be talking about elections, it’s not.

In fact, candidate filing has already closed for the 2026 midterm elections, which means the slate is now set for races that will shape housing, land use, and growth across the Triangle for years to come.

This year’s ballot includes races for U.S. Senate and U.S. House, North Carolina Senate and House, state judicial offices, County District Attorneys, County Boards of Commissioners, and County Boards of Education.

Plus, a newly structured election for Raleigh City Council!

For CITYBUILDER’s election coverage, we’ll focus on the Triangle, specifically local races in Wake, Durham, Orange, Chatham, and Johnston Counties. These counties have the most impact on the region’s housing supply, infrastructure, and long-term growth.

Here’s who’s on the ballot.

Raleigh City Council: A New Election Structure

This year marks a major change for Raleigh’s municipal elections.

For the first time, Raleigh will hold non-partisan primaries, followed by a general election. This also marks the transition to four-year terms for the Raleigh City Council, which means it’s the last time that every member of the council will be elected all at once.

That’s two big changes for Raleigh voters to pay attention to in a busy midterm election cycle. Here’s a summary of the changes (details on the City of Raleigh webpage):

Four-Year Staggered Terms

• Council members and the Mayor will serve four-year terms.

• Approximately half of the members will run every two years.

• Transition Plan:

  • In 2026, half the Council will run for two-year terms expiring in 2028.

  • The other half will run for four-year terms expiring in 2030.

Non-Partisan Primary Election Format

• March Primary: All candidates in a given district will be on the ballot, and the top two vote-getting candidates will advance to the November ballot.

• November Election: The top two candidates from the primary will be voted upon.

In case you missed it, these changes are a result of the Council’s decision to implement the Recommendations of the Study Group Examining Raleigh City Council Terms, Compensation, and Voter Engagement that was commissioned in 2020. The study group, chaired by Eric Braun (from RaleighForward), detailed key reforms that would improve the effectiveness of governance on long term decisions, and increase voter turnout and engagement.

As the committee noted in 2021, these changes matter beyond the city limits.

Raleigh’s zoning, housing, and transportation decisions ripple across the entire region, and this election will shape the city’s direction well into the next decade; likely even longer, as those elected will be voting on Raleigh’s Next Comprehensive Plan.

Raleigh City Council races this year include:

CITY OF RALEIGH MAYOR
Two Candidates for one seat:

Janet Cowell

Ashleigh Heath Armstrong

Since there are only two candidates, this race will not be on the primary ballot.
This seat will be elected for a four-year term.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL AT-LARGE
Six candidates for two seats:

Cameron Zamot

Ms. Stormie Denise Forte

Sana Siddiqui

Clark Rinehart

James G. Bledsoe

Joshua Bradley

The highest vote-getter in November will serve a four-year term, while the second-highest vote-getter will serve a two-year term. This primary will be especially important, as it will narrow the field to four candidates for the general election.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT A
Two candidates for one seat:

Whitney Hill

Mitchell Silver

Since there are only two candidates, this race will not be on the primary ballot.
This seat will be elected for a four-year term.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT B
One candidate for one seat:

Megan Patton

Since there is only one candidate, this race will not be on the primary ballot.
This seat will be elected for a four-year term.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT C
Four candidates for one seat:

Corey Branch

Diana Angie Powell

Jared S. Ollison

Tolulope O. Omokaiye

This race will be on the primary ballot, and will narrow the field to two candidates for the general election.
This seat will be elected for a two-year term.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT D
Two candidates for one seat:

Jane Harrison

Jevon Smith-Cook

Since there are only two candidates, this race will not be on the primary ballot.
This seat will be elected for a two-year term.

CITY OF RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT E
Two candidates for one seat:

Christina Jones

Marc Scruggs

Since there are only two candidates, this race will not be on the primary ballot.
This seat will be elected for a two-year term.

CITYBUILDER will be covering these races closely and sending Raleigh-specific housing-focused questionnaires to all of the candidates.

If you’d like to geek-out on reading the Raleigh ordinance that describes the four-year terms and transition, here it is! If you’d like to read up on how the non-partisan primary system works, you can do so here.

County Commission Races Across the Triangle

While city councils might be more prominent, county governments also play a key role in housing outcomes. They are often the entities best positioned to plan at the regional scale, and in our area, many county governments directly build housing and provide services for people experiencing homelessness. County commissions shape where and how growth happens by coordinating long-range land use planning, urban growth boundaries, and policies that either encourage compact development or allow sprawl to spread outwards unchecked. They oversee major infrastructure investments in water, sewer, stormwater, and schools. County governments usually oversee infrastructure systems that must be planned years in advance and align across multiple municipalities.

When counties fail to coordinate these investments, growth becomes more expensive, more car-dependent, and more environmentally damaging. When they get it right, counties can support housing production in the right places, reducing infrastructure costs per household, and helping cities grow in a way that is fiscally and environmentally sustainable.

This year, the following county commission races (which are partisan) are on the ballot across the Triangle:

Wake County

All the attention here is on the At-Large race, with a crowded field and only Commissioner Safiyah Jackson facing a challenger in her district.

WAKE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS AT-LARGE

Christine Kushner (DEM)

Gary Dale Hartong (REP)

Jonathan Lambert-Melton (DEM)

Kimberly McGhee (DEM)

Kyle Stogoski (REP)

Marguerite Creel (DEM)

Mona Singh (DEM)

Robert Mitchener, Jr (DEM)

Steve S. Rao (DEM)

COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 01

Don Mial (DEM)

COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 02

Safiyah Jackson (DEM)

John B. Adcock (REP)

COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 03

Cheryl F. Stallings

COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 07

Vickie Adamson

Orange County

ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS AT-LARGE

Adam Beeman (DEM)

Jeffrey Hoagland (REP)

Karen Stegman (DEM)

ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 01

Jamezetta Bedford (DEM)

Maria T. Palmer (DEM)

ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 02

Beth Bronson (DEM)

Earl McKee (DEM)

Louis D. Capitanio (REP)

Chatham County

CHATHAM COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 03

Kate O’Brien (DEM)

Michael R. (Mike) Roberson (DEM)

CHATHAM COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 04

John M. Crowell (REP)

Katie Kenlan (DEM)

CHATHAM COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 05

Franklin Gomez Flores (DEM)

Lynn Gaines (DEM)

Steve Ganley (REP)

Johnston County

JOHNSTON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 03

Adam Caldwell (REP)

Chad M. Stewart (REP)

Mike Rose (REP)

JOHNSTON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 05

Patrick Harris (REP)

JOHNSTON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS DISTRICT 07

R.S. (Butch) Lawter, Jr. (REP)

Keith Branch (REP)

Durham County does not have county commission races on the ballot this year, only school board races. However, Durham County remains central to CITYBUILDER’s regional housing coverage. Just this month, we saw one recently unseated Durham City Councilor file for the local State Senate race.

All of these county candidates will also receive our housing questionnaires.
If there are other counties in NC you’d like us to put on our watch list, please reach out and let us know.

State and Federal Races

While CITYBUILDER’s primary focus is local housing policy, state and federal offices shape the guardrails around what cities and counties are allowed to do. However, state and federal races receive lots of coverage from our local media outlets and other organizations like Carolina Forward. There’s a good chance some of the state or federal candidates will dig deep into housing policy this cycle; if that happens, we’ll let you know!

For the 2026 primary and general election, you’ll have candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House, and NC judicial races on your ballot too.

To view every candidate in every primary race across the state, you can check out this comprehensive list from the NC Board of Elections.

What Comes Next

There’s lots to do before the primary election begins. Early voting runs from February 12-28th and Primary Election Day is March 3.

Over the coming weeks, CITYBUILDER will be sending housing-focused questionnaires to candidates in key local races across the Triangle and sharing their responses with you, our members. These questionnaires are designed to get beyond slogans, and assess how candidates understand the region’s housing challenges and their role in addressing them. We’ll be asking about:

• Whether candidates acknowledge the scale and causes of the housing shortage.

• Their willingness to support building more housing to meet current and future needs.

• Leadership on zoning and process reforms that remove barriers to housing production.

• How they think about housing across the full spectrum, from single-family homes to missing middle housing to apartments.

As responses come in, we’ll report them clearly and consistently so readers can see where candidates stand on the housing policies that matter most to our region’s future.

Members can help shape the questions we ask by sending us a note. Readers who want to follow along can subscribe for updates as responses come in. And if you want to support our work more deeply, become a CITYBUILDER paid member and help make this reporting possible.

Subscribe. Become a member. Stay tuned. Housing decisions are on the ballot this year, whether candidates talk about it or not.

1. Focus on your downtown and an ecosystem of neighborhoods. A strong and prosperous place is a healthy ecosystem. Traditional neighborhoods around a core commercial center form the most adaptable, productive, and strong form of development. These places need to thicken up and become vital again. That’s where our iterative and incremental efforts should begin.

2. Focus on neighborhood compatibility and not simply use. Fragile development approaches focus on separating all elements of human habitat into monoculture pods. This is what use-based zoning does, even though monocultures are uniquely fragile. Development regulations need to focus on overall compatibility instead of trying to solve every potential conflict with different degrees of isolation.

3. Focus on expanding housing opportunities. Top-down financing has provided local communities with an abundance of single-family homes and clusters of high-density apartments, but this is like a forest with only two types of plants: sequoias and ferns. Housing types that fall somewhere between these two are often called the “missing-middle” and they’re “missing” partially because cities make them difficult to build. There is enormous demand for expanded housing opportunities and we need to respond to that feedback.

4. Focus on transportation as a means, not an end. Spending money on transportation does nothing for us if it doesn’t make us stronger and more prosperous. Throw out the transportation wishlist (and it’s critical to redirect staff or they will keep pushing for these projects). Shift capital investment dollars so that 90% or more goes toward maintenance, with the remainder directed to neighborhood-focused enhancements identified using the Strong Towns 4-Step Approach to Making Capital Investments.

5. Focus on economic development with a gardening mentality. In good times, nearly every city was out trying to hunt for their next business, paying whatever it took to get them to town. Winning a race to the bottom meant financially losing for the community over the long run. Focus on growing your own ecosystem of businesses, replacing your imported goods and services with locally-produced alternatives whenever possible.

6. Focus on leveraging public spaces. When cities had excess resources, we could pretend that parks were mere recreational amenities. Poorer cities of the past built spectacular parks by recognizing their capacity to improve surrounding property values. Instead of building a parking lot, physically connect your community to your park with improved walkways.

7. Focus on your people. Public engagement must shift from something we do formally as part of a process to something continually ongoing, collected at the point of human experience. Think of a restaurant with a suggestion box versus one where the owner stops by the table while you are eating. That’s the shift we need to make.

8. Focus on reducing debts and liabilities. Cities are burdened with decades of legacy obligations from the suburban growth era—promises that now rob communities of options. The obligation to maintain a road or repair a pipe has real consequences on people’s lives if ignored, so it’s not clear how these unpayable local commitments are rebalanced to fit local capacity. We should be cognizant of not expanding our liabilities while we find ways to adjust community commitments to match community resources.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of work to be done, but it will get you powerful momentum in the direction of growing stronger and more prosperous.

This piece was originally published at “The Local Leader’s Toolkit: A Strong Towns Response to the Pandemic”, and is republished via content sharing agreement.

A Housing Problem That Hits Close to Home

Across North Carolina, from Raleigh and Charlotte to Asheville and Wilmington, people are feeling the squeeze. Housing costs are climbing, traffic congestion is worsening, and more green spaces are taken over by suburban sprawl every year. The state’s population is booming, and our housing supply isn’t keeping up. According to Michael Cline, a demographer writing for the NC Office of State Budget and Management, North Carolina is set to become the 7th most populated state by the year 2030. In order for people of all demographics to be able to afford quality, family-oriented housing, we need to rethink how a growing American city can be structured.

Here in the beloved City of Oaks, we have beautiful greenery throughout our communities, and new retail coming to our downtown areas. Unfortunately, in order to get to those lovely spaces from our suburban homes, we’re forced to drive our cars or risk walking along dangerous roads with no sidewalks.

Our challenge then, is this: how could we reimagine housing options in our city to allow us to walk to our favorite destinations and essential urban amenities?

This piece was written by Student Fellows in collaboration with CITYBUILDER and Single Stair NC. Each semester, CITYBUILDER provides fellowship opportunities for aspiring student urbanists in the Triangle. This semester we’re focused on single-stair apartments. Single Stair NC is a new publication committed to advancing the pursuit of single-stair buildings in North Carolina.

What Is Gentle Density?

Urban development in major U.S. cities has evolved to be “monolithic”. This refers to the ubiquity of a high-density urban core, surrounded by sprawling, low-density suburbs. This method of urban design is predicated on hyper-regulated land use and car-based infrastructure. Thus, our urban spaces don’t feel comfortable at human scale. The buildings are too tall and the roads are too wide for us to comfortably navigate. Mark Johnson of CIVITAS has focused his research on landscape planning in urban environments. He states that modern urban development has been designed around the 20th century ideal of separate spatial uses: a university district over here, a shopping center over there, and residential areas far away from commercial activity. This segmentation of cities necessitates car ownership to get from place to place, and doesn’t allow residents to navigate the urban form at human scale, aka, without a vehicle.

So what’s the solution? The introduction of gentle density could create “pocket neighborhoods,” communities with medium-rise buildings and essential amenities within walking distance. Central to this new urban landscape is an architectural phenomenon that’s already commonplace abroad: single-stair buildings. Allowing residential structures with a single staircase might sound like a technical detail tucked away in building code manuals. But in reality, it’s a seismic design shift that could shape how our neighborhoods grow, bring down the cost of homes, and improve daily life for just about everyone.

What Is a Single-Stair Building?

Most of us are familiar with privately-funded, large-scale apartment buildings. The kind that have long, double-loaded hallways: a corridor in the middle with apartments on both sides, stretching on for what feels like eternity. These buildings usually require at least two staircases for fire safety, one at each end of the hallway.

A single-stair building is different. It’s a smaller, more compact apartment building, typically six stories or fewer and on lots as small as 2,500 sqft (25ft x 100 ft). In these structures, just one central stairwell serves all of the apartments. Think of them as mid-rise buildings designed for a neighborhood block. Due to the low number of apartment units on each floor from the small footprint of the building, only one exit stairway is needed. Each floor’s apartment units open up within just a few feet of the staircase, reducing the travel time from each unit’s door to the outside of the building.

Close stairwell proximity allows architects to create more efficient floor plans. Apartments can have windows on multiple sides, meaning more natural light and better airflow. Courtyards, playgrounds, and small gardens can be tucked into the site instead of being crowded out by extra stair towers and long hallways. Rather than feeling like a giant dormitory, these buildings act closer to a cluster of homes.

Single-stair construction is common in Europe, and in U.S. cities like Seattle and New York, where building code changes have permitted them. The classic New York City walk-up is a common type of single-stair housing, traditionally made on those small 2,500 sqft lots. These structures create efficient land use by allowing many housing units to be built on lots that historically contained just one home. However, in North Carolina and much of the South, our building codes still forbid this method of land use.

Large-scale construction is expensive and requires big developers who have access to vast resources. By permitting single-stair housing in NC, we can make mid-rise developments possible for smaller developers, providing economic opportunities to more individuals in our communities.

Why This Matters for North Carolina

As we’ve discussed, our state is one of the fastest-growing in the country. Cities like Raleigh and Charlotte are expanding at lightspeed, while smaller urban centers like Durham, Wilmington, and Asheville are also attracting new residents at a rapid clip.

The downside of all this growth? Suburban sprawl. Every year, new subdivisions place residents farther away from city centers, paving over farmland and forests. This strains our infrastructure by increasing traffic into urban cores, and makes nearby housing even less affordable, all while commuting times continue to climb.

If we want to grow sustainably, we need gentle density: housing options that add more people per acre without suddenly overwhelming neighborhood infrastructure. Single-stair buildings are one way to achieve that balance. They allow three- to six-story apartment buildings to be tucked onto small lots. This gives us the opportunity to fill in the gaps of urban blocks and create walkable, family-friendly communities.

Compared to our southern neighbors, North Carolina is behind. Just recently, Tennessee changed their legislation to allow single-stair apartment buildings up to five stories tall. This allows developers to increase the variety of housing options in the fast-growing cities of Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga, while reducing the impact of this new housing on existing infrastructure. Additionally, Atlanta, Georgia has approved single-stair apartment buildings up to four stories tall.

Weighing the Tradeoffs

So where does that leave us?

The truth is, single-stair housing isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t solve North Carolina’s housing crisis overnight, and developers will have to familiarize themselves with best practices in safe design. However, it’s clear that our current approach of sprawling suburbs, limited housing choice, and strict two-stair requirements in maze-like apartment complexes just isn’t working.

But to address the safety concerns brought up by opponents of single-stair reforms: evacuation challenges present in large-scale apartment complexes could actually be avoided by building single-stair structures instead. Any given floor in a single-stair building has a lower number of occupants per staircase than the much larger floors of a multi-stair building. Instead of forcing residents to walk down long, confusing hallways in a massive apartment complex, single-stair buildings create smaller, more direct pathways to safety.

Cities like Seattle and New York have already demonstrated that single-stair construction can be done safely when paired with strong fire codes, sprinklers, and modern safety standards. Austin, Texas, along with the nearby cities of Nashville and Memphis, have been actively debating the issue, with fire officials and housing advocates weighing the tradeoffs. North Carolina can learn from these examples rather than starting from scratch.

One possible path forward is to pilot single-stair construction in select areas, perhaps in neighborhoods surrounding downtown Raleigh, Charlotte, and Durham, where fire departments are better equipped and demand for housing is highest. These test cases could help identify best practices and build public trust before the model is expanded statewide.

Building for a Growing Future

North Carolina is changing fast. Our cities are swelling, our neighborhoods are stretching, and our housing supply is lagging behind. If we want to grow in a way that preserves our natural landscapes, builds stronger communities, and keeps housing within reach, we need to consider new approaches.

Single-stair buildings are a promising tool for the creation of “missing middle” housing. This method of development would allow us to add gentle density, improve housing quality, and make better use of limited urban land. The key is to balance innovation with safety, learning from other cities while tailoring solutions to our unique context.

At the end of the day, this isn’t just about stairs. It’s about how we want North Carolina to look and feel in the decades to come. Do we want endless sprawl and sky-high rents, or walkable neighborhoods where families, young professionals, and retirees can all find a place to call home?

The conversation about single-stair housing is really a conversation about our shared future. It’s a conversation worth having, before the choice is made for us by the pressures of growth.

Julie Powers is a Bachelor of Architecture Student at NC State University, with a LAEP minor. Additional graphic and illustation support was provided by NC State Undergraduate College of Design in Architecture major Brenna Belcher.

The 2025 municipal elections are over. Check out who won near you at WRAL.

In case you missed it, Election Day 2025 resulted in big victories for pro-housing candidates across the Triangle. Out of the 26 pro-housing candidates we identified in races large and small, we are thrilled to say that 18 of them were voted into office on Tuesday. From Wendell to Wake Forest, from Holly Springs to Hillsborough, people voted for elected officials that will lead on housing.

A couple of highlights from races that stood out to us:

• Pro-housing candidates Dustin Ingalls and Deans Eastman were elected to the Town of Wendell Board of Commissioners.

• Pittsboro voted to elect pro-housing candidate Candace Hunziker as a Town Commissioner, and re-elected pro-housing mayor Kyle Shipp.

• In Morrisville, pro-housing mayor TJ Cawley held his seat, and pro-housing Harrison Kesling was e…

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Every generation believes its challenges are unique, but America’s housing shortage is both timeless and urgent. It touches nearly every family, in every county and every political district. From the price of a starter home to the scarcity of affordable rentals, the cost of housing now defines our quality of life and our local politics alike.

In the Triangle, that reality feels close to home. Families who have lived here for decades watch their children priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in. Newcomers arrive ready to work, but struggle to find a place to live. And too many of our cities have allowed the same pattern to continue: long approval processes, outdated zoning, and too little housing of every kind.

Local elections decide how our cities grow. They decide who approves the next housing project, who sets zoning rules, and who says yes or no to new neighbors. Yet we often treat every rezoning like a referendum instead of a responsibility. We argue over the details and forg…

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When I attended Duke Kunshan University, thousands of miles from my hometown of Kansas City, my passion for urbanism was sparked unexpectedly. While I originally pursued a path in local government to create positive change in my own community, studying at DKU expanded my understanding of what that change could look like, introducing me to the intricate world of urban design and planning.

From the impressive public transportation systems in China to the grassroots urbanist energy in North Carolina’s Triangle region, my journey has shown me the transformative power of thoughtful city-building. My experiences across continents, from Kansas City to Kunshan to the Carolinas, have shaped my vision for more livable, equitable, and inspiring communities.

Growing Up in Suburbia

Like most Americans, I grew up in suburbia. I won’t bore you with the details I’m sure you’re familiar with. My neighborhood was quiet and spread out, and you couldn’t go anywhere without a car (though that didn’t stop me …

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Municipal leaders shape housing every time they vote on rezonings, update development rules, or decide where new homes can be built. While Congress gets more attention, it’s your city councils, town boards, and county commissions that determine whether we build inward with walkable neighborhoods or outward with sprawl.

That’s why CITYBUILDER created the Triangle Housing Candidate Report Cards.

Working with RDU New Liberals, Yes! in My Triangle YIMBYaction chapter, and Strong Towns Raleigh Local Conversation, we collaboratively graded candidates on their approach to housing, growth, and community resilience.

The Triangle is a growing region, and that growth brings pressure to both b…

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