We Built This City Together
The stories, moments, and housing wins our community made possible in 2025
First and foremost, thank you. None of our progress this past year would have been possible without you. Together, we’ve built a coalition that’s reaching and recruiting community members throughout the Triangle and beyond.
We began 2025 with big ambitions, and we were able to accomplish more than we could have imagined because of the convictions of the company we keep. We are humbled with gratitude.
So what have we done?
We grew together. In January, CITYBUILDER launched in earnest and hit the ground running with monthly events and bi-weekly publications. Since the beginning, the pro-housing community has shown up to our events and shared our writings to create an ever-widening web of regional housing activists. It’s been astonishing to see.
Our Writing Community
In 2025, CITYBUILDER published over a hundred articles from more than twenty local authors and CITYBUILDER Students Fellows.
Here are a few of our favorite pieces from this year:
Where Will the 4-Year-Old Kick the Ball? by Topher Thomas, of Coram Homes in Durham
Raleigh’s Missing Middle Reforms Built More Housing by Leo Suarez, Raleigh-based housing and transit advocate, and curator of the DTRaleigh forum.
POP THE CAP 1: Lessons in Statewide Reform & POP THE CAP 2: What Does Craft Beer Teach Us About Crafting Cities? by Adeleine Gartner, Student Fellow
Special Report: NC Lawmakers Push for More Housing by Jenn Truman
Who Killed the Neighborhood Grocery Store? and Durham’s New UDO: Small Rules, Big Problems by Dave Olverson, incremental developer and zoning advocate in Durham.
People Deserve to Live Near Parks, Densification is Climate Justice, and We Want Smaller Builders, all part of our ongoing VERBATIM series.
We Support a ‘Baseball First’ Policy by Levent Göknar, Student Fellow
How a Chapel Hill Church Built 3 Tiny Homes by Eli Smith, Director at the Faith-Based Housing Initiative
Why Greenway Investment is Essential For Safety by John Martin, East Coast Greenway Alliance Communications Director
Coalition Building Through Events
In 2025, you showed up when CITYBUILDER hosted and co-hosted events across the Triangle to welcome new voices into the pro-housing conversation. We loved meeting so many of you face to face, and getting to know you throughout the year. There were so many events that we can’t recount each one here, but we wanted to highlight a few of our favorites:
CITYBUILDER BOOK CLUB
Book Club has been one of our absolute favorite events (continuing in 2026!). Our monthly Book Club lunches (at the very yummy PRESS Cafe in Raleigh) have been an opportunity to come together and break bread (literally) to discuss themes and topics of seminal works on housing and urbanism. While reading the book is encouraged, it’s never required.
In 2025 we enjoyed discussing the following titles:
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live by Sarah Susanka and Kira Obolensky
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
The Charter of the New Urbanism by The Congress of The New Urbanism
Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis by Charles L. Marohn Jr. and Daniel Herriges
On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy by Jerusalem Demsas.
We hope to see you at the next book club on January 28th to learn more about Building for People by Michael Eliason, with our discussion led by Ben Cappellacci.
DURHAM ELECTION CANDIDATE FORUM ON HOUSING
In October, we hosted our inaugural Durham candidate forum, the first-ever local candidate forum focused entirely on housing. This event was important to ensure that voters in Durham had an opportunity to hear directly from candidates about their views on housing, land use, and growth. In case you missed it, you can read our full recap of the forum in our piece, People Want to Talk About Housing.
KIDS LOVE URBANISM EVENTS
The future of our cities belongs to the next generation. Our Kids Love Urbanism events made city building tangible, creative, and fun for the entire family.
UDO KICK-THE-TIRE WORKSHOPS
We led hands-on sessions that demystified zoning and development rules, empowering residents to engage meaningfully with planning processes to form Durham’s new Unified Development Ordinance.
MOVE-A-BULL DURHAM
We can’t have safe streets without communities that are designed for people instead of cars. Move-A-Bull Durham was the perfect event to add fun to the technical elements of a more walkable city: street design, parking, and land use policies which affect everyday life. Thanks to everyone who came by and said hi; we hope to see you there again next year!
CAROLINA POLICY TALKS
In our ongoing CAROLINA POLICY TALK series, we explored the landscape of local urban planning together. In 2025, our talks covered a range of topics, from urgent legislative developments, to builders’ stories of the barriers they encounter when attempting to build small, incremental, infill housing. Keep an eye out for our upcoming series, case studies, and walk-throughs in 2026.
BUILDING CONVERSATIONS COLLABORATION WITH AIA TRIANGLE
This past fall, in collaboration with the AIA Triangle through their Activate Grant, CITYBUILDER hosted a series of roundtable breakfasts in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Pittsboro. These events brought together local elected officials, as well as builders, designers, and architects, to discuss the changes we must make in our communities in order to build better together.
ANNUAL RECEPTION WITH WAKEUP WAKE COUNTY & RALEIGHFORWARD
We concluded the year by joining our friends from WakeUp Wake County and RaleighForward to host an annual reception. In addition to connecting with familiar faces and friends we’ve made in the past year of this work, we were delighted to learn more about housing policy with NC State Senator Jay Chaudhuri, and end with a keynote speech from nationally renowned housing researcher Dr. Jenny Schuetz, an urban economist and the author of Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.
The Impact We’ve Made
Together in 2025, you helped CITYBUILDER’s work extend beyond publications and meet-ups. You enabled us to play a direct role in shaping local decision-making.
In Durham, we issued municipal report cards rooted in a simple principle: local leaders should support policies that allow more homes, more neighbors, and more opportunity. Across the Triangle, CITYBUILDER released our first-ever slate of election endorsements, covering twenty candidates across twelve municipalities, from Carrboro to Zebulon. Those endorsements helped elevate housing as a central issue in elections across the region, and gave voters clear signals on the pro-housing issues that are important to all of us, resulting in pro-housing candidate wins across the Triangle.
Just as importantly, our reporting and public education efforts helped normalize pro-homes ideas that once felt politically risky. Policies that were considered fringe a few years ago are now part of mainstream conversation, and increasingly, official action.
And obviously, we aren’t done yet. While we’ve been busy changing hearts and minds at the local level, the big issues surrounding housing supply and affordability still weigh heavily on us all. While we take a moment to celebrate our accomplishments, and to thank you, dear CITYBUILDERs, for your support, we know that the building must continue. You’ve helped us lay a strong foundation. Now it’s time to go vertical.
What a year, CityBuilder! Congratulations on your achievements and looking forward to the impact and influence you'll make in 2026!