The FY2026-27 budget process didn’t actually end when Senate Bill 257 became law. Two follow-on bills – House Bill 56 and House Bill 268, both styled as “technical corrections” – moved hundreds of millions of dollars and rewrote dozens of policy provisions in the weeks after. We’re talking about $89 million in completely new spending, $114 million in increases to existing spending, and $23 million in cuts to previously approved spending.

These bills also making meaningful changes to the Governor’s appointment authority, the composition of the Local Government Commission, and the powers and independence of various state agencies, ranging from the Office of the State Fire Marshal to the State Bureau of Investigation and the State Highway Patrol.

You can see our interactive tracker, and read my executive summary of the changes, over at the Carolina Forward blog.

Our interactive budget tracker allows you to filter by bill number, topic/area, type of funding change, recipient type, funding source, and recurring or non-recurring funds. It also allows you to use a keyword search.

The policy tracker lists the bill and section citation for each policy summarized.

Coming up soon on the Chapel Hill beat: LUMO changes, stormwater plans, and more!

North Carolina’s new state budget includes some significant changes for the gambling industry. The tax on sportsbook gross wagering revenue will increase from 18% to 23%, while prediction markets will, for the first time, pay a 6% tax on net trading fee revenue. The budget also tweaks where the revenue collected from gambling companies will go.

Both profit models exploit gambling addiction. But prediction markets are less regulated than sportsbooks in North Carolina. Here’s a breakdown of what’s changing, what it means for North Carolina, and who’s driving the changes.

How They Work

A sportsbook makes money by pricing bets so that the house inevitably makes money over time. You bet against the house, not against other players, and the house rigs the odds of the game.

Consider a coin flip. When you call heads or tails, you have a 50/50 chance of being right. A “fair” bet would reflect the true odds of the event. That means you would bet $1.00 for the chance of winning $1.00.

Sportsbooks make money by assigning unfair prices to the odds. For example, if you bet on coin flips, you would pay $1.10 for the chance at winning $1.00. Because a coin flip has 50/50 odds, you would expect to win half the time and lose half the time over many bets. In a fair scenario, you would ultimately break even: you’d win $1.00 half the time, lose $1.00 half the time, and end up where you started.

If you’re paying $1.10 for a chance to win $1.00, then after ten wins and ten losses, you’d have lost $11.00 and won $10.00. The house makes a 10% profit and you lose a dollar.

Prediction markets make money by charging you fees every time you place a bet. You bet against other players, not against the house. Prediction market operators don’t care who’s right, or what the odds are–they make money as long as people are betting, regardless of outcome.

How They’re Taxed and Where It Goes

The regulations on both types of gambling are insubstantial..

Sportsbooks are regulated at the state level by the State Lottery Commission. Mobile sportsbook operators are required to partner with in-state professional sports teams, leagues, or venues. They also have to work with the Lottery Commission to give gamblers the option of barring themselves from betting.

Prediction markets are not regulated at the state level.

The sportsbook ecosystem includes three different kinds of license fees paid to the government:

• a $1,000,000 license fee for the operator’s license, valid for five years, with the option of another $1,000,000 to renew

• A $50,000 service fee for companies that provide operators with services (like payment processing)

• A $30,000 supplier license for vendors selling inputs to the operators (like live stats)

Originally, sportsbook operators paid 18% of their gross (not net!) wagering revenue in state taxes. The new state budget increased the tax to 23%.

North Carolina gamblers wagered $6.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2025 (July of 24 through June of 25). Sportsbook operators earned gross wagering revenue of around $650 million, which resulted in $116 million of state revenue. In Fiscal Year 2026, North Carolinians wagered about $7.4 billion, which produced a gross wagering revenue of about $800 million for sportsbook operators and about $143 million for the state.

$2 million annually goes to gambling addiction treatment. An additional $2 million annually goes to youth sports programs. The rest goes to the Major Games, Events, and Attractions fund, to college athletics, and to the state’s general fund.

Prediction markets have not yet created any tax revenue. They will pay 6% of their net trading fees to the state. They will not, under current law, be required to seek licensure – and therefore will not pay any licensing fees.

We’ve Got A Gambling Problem

Gambling was first legalized in North Carolina in 2023. Between 2022 and 2024, gambling operators funneled more than $3 million to North Carolina politicians, coinciding with major lobbying campaigns to shape gambling legislation. As campaign finance reports come out in the wake of the new budget, we’ll be able to see what kind of contributions may have flowed to North Carolina legislators during the same period that the new sportsbook and prediction market legislation was written.

Gambling is a problem for North Carolina. The Republican legislature has pursued an aggressive revenue reduction program by decreasing personal and corporate income taxes. Legalized gambling will ostensibly help plug the gap. But this is a bad, unfair system of funding public goods. It sucks revenue from people with a medically-recognized addiction instead of developing a taxation system that asks everyone, including the rich, to pay their fair share for the privilege and pleasure of living in a safe, democratic society.

We can develop a sound fiscal footing for the state of North Carolina without encouraging gambling addiction. Unfortunately, this budget weakens our fiscal position and shifts some of the responsibility for closing that gap onto gamblers.

I hope you find the information below helpful.

Personnel

The Town of Chapel Hill employs nearly 800 people. Here’s how that breaks down across departments:

Decimals represent part-time jobs. Personnel constitute 61% of the Town’s budget.

We take pride in treating our employees fairly, but the Town’s recent pay study confirmed what high turnover rates in some jobs suggested: pay hasn’t been competitive across the board. The highest turnover jobs included police officers, firefighters, construction workers, CDL-certified transit drivers, mechanics, building inspectors, and parks and rec staff.

Providing competitive pay is smart and fair. It helps us to recruit and keep high-performing employees, which increases the quality and consistency of our services, and it frees up supervisors and other employees to focus on their core responsibilities rather than repeatedly training new employees or trying to cover for vacant positions.

Revenues and Expenditures

Let’s look at the money.

There’s only one major revenue source the Town can control: property taxes. We can’t change the sales tax rate, and we don’t have the authority to levy an income tax. We’re also not allowed by state law to tax different kinds of properties at different rates.

Chapel Hill’s budget lives in multiple different buckets, or funds. Those different funds will add up to $162,468,731 in the recommended budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which runs from June of 2026 to June of 2027.

The Town’s biggest financial commitments support staff capacity and operational expenses in the following departments:

• Police

• Public Works

• Fire

• Parks and Rec

• Transit

• Library

• the Manager’s Office

• Stormwater Management

The table above breaks down how $100 million of Town dollars are divided across departments. The table below shows exactly how many dollars that translates to.

As you can see, spending on our Police and Fire departments dwarfs what we spend on any other department. Add in Public Works and you’ve covered 51% of the $100 million spent in this round up of departmental operations.

My guess is that the least intuitive of these departments is the Manager’s department, so I’ll linger for a moment on what that department provides.

In addition to the the Manager and two Deputy Managers, whom you’d expect to find there, this department also includes the Communications team, Economic Development, the Town Clerk’s office, and our Climate Action staff. There’s a project manager and an urban designer hired to improve how new developments are situated.

You can find the full departmental rosters broken down by title in the Manager’s recommended budget. The only other department I’ll address in this post is the Mayor and Council. That department includes one full-time employee, the Mayor’s Assistant, plus stipends and healthcare for the Mayor and Council.

As you may or may not know, our state legislature pays its members a little under $14,000. When you add in their mileage reimbursement and the per diem they receive during session, members earn at most $30,000 per year for their service in exchange for a hefty time commitment that’s hard to balance with other jobs.

The Town Council meets less frequently than the legislature and is much less inconvenient, since it meets only after working hours, but it is still a significant time commitment. If elected officials aren’t compensated for that time, you can pretty much rule out convincing anyone who makes less than the median income, which in our area is now around $100,000, to serve.

When I was searching for work after the Harris campaign, I depended fully on the Town stipend and the optional healthcare enrollment to pay my rent and to visit the doctor. I’m not the only Councilor who has had to look for work while serving on the Council, so I’m confident that it’s an investment that makes it possible for different kinds of people to serve the community we love!

In my next post, I’ll dive into special programs and non-departmental spending. If you there’s anything specific you want to know more about, please let me know!

Here’s how they’re trying to trick you into approving unilateral disarmament and handing control to the robber barons forever.

Constitutional Amendments

SB 1080 Lower Taxes for All in NC

You’ll see a referendum on the ballot to amend the NC Constitution by capping everyone’s tax rate at 3.5%. Voters previously approved a 7% cap in 2018. Once upon a time, the wealthiest North Carolinians paid a slightly higher percentage of their income in taxes than the poorest. That isn’t the case anymore. Now, the Republicans are pushing a tax scam that would line their friends’ pockets while crippling the state’s capacity to provide excellent services to every resident.

This bill passed the Senate on straight party lines with a 30-18 vote and passed the House 73-46, with two former Democrats, Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed, voting with Republicans.

HB 1089 Constitutional Amendment Property Tax Levy Limit

You’ll also see a referendum on your ballot that would amend the Constitution to require the General Assembly to enact laws that limit how much property tax can be collected. The bill is vague, but we know what will happen local governments will lose the ability to meet their communities’ needs.

North Carolina law already has a limit on property taxes. No level of government may, on its own, charge more than $1.50 per $100 of value on private property.

The Consumer Price Index now calculates inflation at 3.8%. But this tracks a specific basket of goods that households commonly need. Not on that list? Fire trucks, bus tires, EMS equipment, municipal and county IT software and hardware, public pool equipment, police cruisers, and other items that have increased in cost way, way faster than the typical rate of household inflation.

The same corporations that price gouge consumers at the pump and the grocery aisle are price gouging towns and counties when they try to order. Often, procurement rules force towns and cities into working with a small number of sellers who can effectively charge whatever they want by working together to keep prices high.

The state needs to crack down on bad actors. But it also needs to make sure towns and counties have the authority to raise money to respond to local crises, like an exodus of firefighters and medics, an unexpected failure in the water processing plant, or vital repairs to public pools, parks, and school facilities.

This bill passed the House in a 73-46 vote and the Senate 31-19. Former Democrats Majeed and Cunningham again joined Republicans in the House to vote for the proposal, while former Democratic Minority Leader Dan Blue was the lone Democrat to break ranks and vote with Republicans in the Senate.

HB 144 Elect State Board of Education and Superintendent As SBE Chair

This bill continues an unhappy trend of changes made to the state government to make basic state functions more partisan, more political, and less fair. Up until now, the Governor has chosen respected educational professionals and leaders to sit on the State Board of Education, subject to confirmation by the General Assembly.

This bill would change that by making the Board members publicly elected. While that could be fine in a fair system, it also gives the legislature authority to draw the districts for their appointment. This legislature isn’t afraid to gerrymander districts that disenfranchise a majority of residents.

SB 1082 Constitutional Right to Work

North Carolina is a “Right to Work” state. That means that employers and unions are both prohibited from forming agreements that make union membership and the payment of union dues requirements for employees. North Carolina law also specifically prohibits public sector workers from winning contracts through collective bargaining.

That has helped to recruit lots of corporations to the state, but has also helped to ensure that wages lag behind the state’s GDP growth (which measures the productivity of corporations, not the financial wellbeing of residents).

Elevating the right to work provision into the Constitution will increase the difficulty of amending this policy if public opinion changes.

SB 1081 Constitutional Right to Farm

This bill is a PR exercise. Farming is legal, and will remain legal. The only motive we can infer for this bill is that its sponsors are casting about for any tool to boost conservative turnout in an election year likely to be characterized by expensive tariffs and high gas prices.

Unfortunately, this could also have significant negative impacts on plaintiffs seeking to sue big agricultural corporations that are harming their workers, local communities, and the environment.

The Takeaway

Legislators beholden to big corporations and the oligarchs who own them are arguing that government revenues – taxes – are making life too expensive.

In fact, the government is the only tool that citizens have to fight back against exploitation by big corporations and the super rich. People don’t feel that the government is doing a particularly good job, and they’re right. But that’s because the government has been captured by people serving the interests of the same oligarchs who are now pushing to permanently defund it.

The people meant to represent us are insulated from accountability by gerrymandering and are now working to advance the interests of corporations and the super rich.

Government is the only tool citizens can ever control to lower costs and make life more fair. It’s the only entity structurally designed to promote public welfare and not private profit.

These legislative proposals are intended to permanently defund the government so that whenever the tide turns, whenever leaders who put people first are back in charge, they won’t have the resources to fix what’s broken in our system and make life genuinely affordable and genuinely fair.

Going to speak evoked complicated feelings for me. Winning that pay raise campaign back in 2023 is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my brief political career. We went from a minimum stipend of $16,000 per year to $20,000 per year, a 25% increase that took us from the lowest-paid graduate school in our peer group to the middle of the pack.

Labor organizing, done right, makes you feel like you are part of a movement. I felt righteous, and I was part of a motivated and engaged community chasing down a small-p political goal: getting the people in power to pay us a more fair wage. Our project was morally good, and it connected us to each other.

That was a great feeling.

My feelings yesterday were more complicated. That’s because the impact of that pay raise has, just three years later, already been wiped out.

The living wage in this county for a single adult without children is $51,900 per year, $4,325 per month.

The current minimum stipend for graduate students at UNC is $10,584 per semester, for a total of $21,168 per year or $1,764 per month.

According to HUD, the cheapest fair market rent you would expect to find in this area is $1,548 per month. By splitting a two-bedroom, however, you might manage to bring your rent down to $936 — taking you from spending 87% of your monthly income on rent on a single-occupant studio apartment to spending 53% of your income on rent if you split a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate.

Perhaps that’s part of why 58% of our renters—11,290 households—are spending more than a third of their income on rent. The technical term for renters who spend more than 30% of their income on rent is “cost burdened.”

49% of renters statewide are cost burdened, so we’re significantly worse than average here in Orange County.

It’s not as simple as just paying graduate students more—to actually reduce poverty, we’d need upward pressure on wages and downward pressure on rents, which means both more fair pay from UNC and some light, carefully calibrated rent stabilization rules.

For rent stabilization to work, you need to have similar rules in every market. What we’ve seen is that imposing rent control on one town, one region, or even one state will often depress housing construction. People will take their business elsewhere unless there isn’t another real option. And if the regulation isn’t well-designed, but does apply nationwide, and it becomes too onerous, investors will simply take their capital to another sector.

In other words, my current opinion is that rent stabilization is probably only a net win for American consumers if light stabilization rules are applied nationwide.

In the meantime, the best that UNC’s workers can hope for is that if they organize together, they can put tremendous pressure on their administrative leadership to prioritize building and operating lots of below-market rate housing for their cost burdened employees. Creating housing at prices that allows workers who currently can’t afford housing in Chapel Hill to get inside of our city limits makes all of our public infrastructure investments more efficient (more people on our sidewalks, buses, and greenways) and reduces costs for workers (by reducing the transportation costs associated with car leasing or ownership, long commutes, and expensive campus parking).

It would also mean less traffic, since almost all of our traffic congestion is caused by people commuting to and from work (residents work in other counties, workers live in other counties, and people going to and from work in other parts of the Triangle pass through Chapel Hill on their way there).

But enough about policy. Here’s what I said on May Day, 2026.

The Speech

Thanks to Nyssa and to UE-150 for the invitation to speak. I want to talk to you today about what organizing is.

When I came to UNC as a graduate student in 2019, the base pay in the college of Arts and Sciences was $16,000. At the end of my first year, no one in the English department ran to be head of the department’s grad student association. I thought somebody should at least organize some social events and have some parties, so I agreed to do it.

As soon as I stepped into that role, people began asking me if I could get us a pay raise.

I heard from people choosing between dental work and car repairs because they didn’t have enough money for both. I heard from people eating rice and beans for a month straight to save up to pay for flights home. I heard from people who were going into debt it would take a decade to get out of—if they ever got out of it.

On Wednesday, I was at the General Assembly for Housing Day. I spoke with members of the majority party - Republicans - to ask for help creating more affordable housing.

What one of them said stuck with me.

He said: “I own some rental properties. And I’ll tell you, what I see is that people live above their means. I go in there, they have all sorts of belts in the closet. Shoes and things. Nice tvs. These people need to learn to budget and live within their means. Do you buy a soda every time you go to the gas station? That’s five dollars for what you could spend fifty cents on in bulk at a Costco.”

Let me ask you: are any of your problems because you don’t know how to budget?

Successful organizing requires the spirit of the happy warrior. You have to go everywhere, listen to everyone, give everyone a chance, use discernment to see who is gettable, and then build your list of who influences who, who brings who to the table, and turn that into power.

It means signing up for work that isn’t fair and that you shouldn’t have to do to convince people to do better and be better.

It’s not fair, but it is necessary.

That’s what we did in that pay raise campaign. We went to any department where we could find a grad student to host us. That ended up being forty departments. We asked everyone there to get the rest of the grad students in their department to talk to their faculty. The faculty endorsed our proposal. We went to the employee forum. The employee forum endorsed our proposal. We built momentum and we won.

I am not telling you that organizing at UNC is easy. It is extremely hard. But it is possible, and it is the only thing that works.

I want to end with a little call and response. When I say “organize!” you say “now!”

I oppose shrinking the size of the Council and support increasing the Mayor’s term.

Here’s my explanation.

Against Shrinking the Council

My eight colleagues each have unique experiences and insights. In recent years, the Council has, with robust debate, accomplished police reform, adopted the Complete Community plan, passed a housing bond, enacted land use reforms, and is now poised to speed up our greenway construction schedule.

Shrinking the Council doesn’t seem to solve any particularly important problem. It does make the Council less diverse in interests, experience, and demography, and it does make it harder for new members to win election alongside incumbents.

For Four-Year Terms

I’m also against two-year terms for any office. Running every two years means that candidates are spending roughly 50% of their term actively campaigning. Campaigns are time-consuming. Holding municipal office is a part time job, and we all—especially working people—have finite time. Therefore, campaigning takes away from the time you can spend studying the vast quantities of information that any Council member could be learning at any given time. The truth is, there is so much to learn that all of us can easily learn and re-learn important information no matter how long we serve.

A two-year term encourages constant campaigning, which makes holding office exhausting and time intensive (and therefore harder to hold for working people). Accountability is important, and we should expect our elected officials to be active, present, and communicative during their service. But we should have an electoral system that balances electoral accountability with the time and space to absorb a lot of complex information and make good, long-range planning decisions.

The Process

Council received a memo on March 26 from the Town Attorney outlining the options for shrinking the Council, which included the following recommendation:

North Carolina law allows the Council to determine its own size, as long as it has between 3 and 12 members. The Council can set its size by:

• asking the General Assembly to amend our charter through a local bill

• passing an ordinance to amend our own charter

• putting a proposal to a citizen referendum

If the Council chooses not to hold a referendum, citizens may force one anyway by acquiring, within 30 days of the ordinance’s adoption, the signatures of i) 10% of all registered voters in the municipal limits or ii) 5,000 people, whichever is smaller.

There are three paths to shrinking the Council:

1. The recommended proposal in the memo is to eliminate 2 seats in 2027 and keep 4 seats in 2029. That would create a permanent hard cycle and easy cycle, since you would have 2 council seats up in 2027, 2031, 2035, and so on, and you would have 4 seats up in 2029, 2033, 2037, etc. This is the worst option.

2. The second option is to drop 1 seat in 2027 and 1 seat in 2029. This would create a two year period in which it was repeatedly possible for the Council to reach a 4-4 voting deadlock. Not great, not terrible.

3. The third option is for the Council to elect 4 seats in 2027, give the fourth-place finisher a 2-year term, and then elect 3 seats in 2029. If Council does choose to reduce its size, this is the best option, with local historical precedent.

In 1975, when the Council first expanded from 7 to 9 members, the town elected a total of 5 seats that November, adding 2 seats in one cycle. The last place finisher, Marvin Silver, won a 2-year term, and his seat was then up for re-election in 1977 as the new 4th seat.

In other words, they added two new seats in 1975, bringing the Council from 7 members to 9, and one of the two seats ran again in 1977.

This allowed the Council to avoid a potential deadlock situation, and permitted them to transition to a balanced 4-and-4 electoral cycle.

Waynesville used this technique to give the bottom two finishers in their municipal election two-year terms as recently as 2021 as part of their switch from electing the entire council at once to have staggered terms, so it appears that this option is still available.

Procedural History

This is not the first time that Chapel Hill has considered changing Council size or the Mayor’s term.

Many of you know that one of my political heroes is Howard Lee, our former Mayor and state Senator. He was serving as Mayor in 1975, the year that the Council increased from 7 members to 9. As you can see in these minutes from 1975, then-Mayor Lee supported a 9-person Council because increasing the Council would provide “broader representation from the community.” Gerry Cohen, the first student ever elected to the Town Council, also supported the Board’s expansion, sharing the belief that it would provide “better community representation in Town government.”

Then-Mayor Lee also supported a four-year term for the Mayor, noting that it was “a key leadership role” and that it “takes the Mayor two years to learn the job and four years to finish programs.” The Council approved four-year terms with one dissenting vote. They later reverted to a two-year term for the Mayor, though I haven’t been able to find much information about why.

Electoral History

If the Council established a cycle in which only 2 candidates could be elected in a given year, that seriously disadvantages youth candidates, older candidates, and candidates who are neither Black nor White.

Since 1975, Chapel Hill has elected 8 challengers under the age of 35: Bob Epting (1975), David Pasquini (1981), Mark Chilton (1991), Mark Kleinschmidt (2001), Lee Storrow (2011), Allen Buansi (2017), Tai Huynh (2019), and me (2023). None of those challengers finished in the the top two spots.

Only 2 challengers under the age of 40 have finished in the top two spots in the last 50 years: Beverly Kawalec, who finished 2nd in 1977, and Jess Anderson, who finished in 1st in 2015.

Conversely, Chapel Hill has elected 6 challengers over the age of 60 in the last 50 years: Joe Straley (1979), Winston Broadfoot (1981), James Wallace (1987), Michael Parker (2015), and Melissa McCullough (2023). Only Melissa finished in the top 2.

This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for younger and older candidates to get elected, just that shrinking the Council would likely make it harder. The trend seems similar for race and ethnicity. Maria Palmer (the only Latina to hold office in Chapel Hill so far, elected in 2013), and Tai Huynh (the first and only Vietnamese American to hold office in North Carolina so far, elected in 2019) both finished in fourth place. Conversely, Hongbin Gu, Chapel Hill’s first and only Chinese elected official, finished in first place in 2015, and Black challengers have finished in the top 2 about 50% of the time over the last 50 years.

In Summary

Shrinking the Council seems unlikely to accomplish anything important, while increasing the mayor’s term seems like it would reduce barriers to holding the office, decrease the negative effects of a constant campaign cycle, and increase the incentives to think about long-term objectives rather than short-term campaign goals.

My comments, inbox, and cell phone are open for your input.

To help protect the spirit of our town, the Town Council adopted a new plan called the Complete Community framework. It outlined how to fight the two biggest costs American households face each month: housing and transportation.

By building more housing, and encouraging more types of housing, we can recreate attainable home ownership and put downward pressure on increasing rents. And by building a world-class greenway network, we can reduce transportation costs while adding a third element, alongside our public schools and our public university, that makes Chapel Hill a uniquely appealing place to live.

As the Orange County Commissioners weigh new land use choices, and communities around the state and across the country demand more affordable lives, it’s time to ask if we’ve actually followed the recommendations in the Complete Community plan.

Here’s What the Plan Said

Take a look at this critical passage from the Complete Community “Tradeoffs Analysis” presented in December of 2022:

If Chapel Hill continues to grow as it does now, it has enough developable land to create about 12,000 housing units. That is enough for 20 to 25 years, but it will result in further sprawl and much of that housing will be occupied by higher-income people. If the Town plans more walkable neighborhoods and coordinates the development of streets, parks and stormwater treatment facilities within them, it can create 25,000 to 50,000 [units] of new housing that will be more inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

If the town goes about business as usual, it will add 12,000 new homes over the next 25 years. That’s 480 new homes per year. For several years now, I’ve heard the number 485 homes per year cited as what it will take to stay “on track” with our housing goals. In fact, that’s the number that it would take to keep things from getting worse—not the number we need to make things better. You can find confirmation of that in this housing study presented to the Town in 2021, which states that this is just the number needed “to keep the jobs-housing ratio from rising” — not the number needed to decrease it.

Building just 485 homes per year is a recipe for maintaining, not improving, our community’s high cost of living and economic exclusivity.

Here’s what the plan said we actually need to do:

1. Create 25,000 to 50,000 new homes over 20-25 years.

2. Build a fully connected, 25+ mile greenway network in 25 years or less.

That would mean an average of 1,000-1,250 new homes per year to reach 25,000 new homes, or an average of 2,000-2,500 new homes per year to reach 50,000 new homes. And it would mean, at minimum, an average of 1 mile of new greenway construction per year over 25 years.

How the Greenways Will Help

Greenways will allow us to attack the high cost of transportation by reducing reliance on cars. You can easily find documentation of how expensive cars are. The NYT just published a piece pointing out that the average price is now $50,000 for a new car and $20,000-25,000 for a used car. AAA says that the annual cost of car ownership for Americans is more than $12,000 per year.

Reducing trips saves money. Owning fewer cars saves money. Most of our traffic comes from employees going to and from work and families going to and from school or extracurriculars.

A wider range of affordably priced homes (for sale and for rent) and a serious network of greenways, sidewalks, and buses would markedly improve traffic.

That combination of affordable homes and accessible greenways would put workers and families within reach of most of their destinations without getting behind a wheel.

And that’s why, in contrast to a purely supply-side approach, I am still committed to targeted subsidy programs and workforce housing partnerships intended to house workers inside city limits. When we house workers, specifically, in below market housing inside city limits, we’re making all of our other investments more efficient, because we’re getting cars off the road and people onto our sidewalks, buses, and greenways.

In a recent email to the Town Council, Shift Chapel Hill-Carrboro noted that the Town built only 1.65 miles of new greenway from 2015 to 2025.

To bring our average rate of construction up to 1 mile of greenway construction per year, and to finish the network on time, the Council will need to allocate additional annually recurring funds to the Office of Mobility and Greenways.

Greenway construction costs anywhere from $1-2 million per mile on simple terrain to $2-5 million per mile in the most complex scenarios. We should have a better sense of what specific portions of the network will cost us when the Everywhere to Everywhere feasibility study is finished.

A complete greenway network would set Chapel Hill apart from every other town in North Carolina, and most towns in the US.

We Have Our Targets. Can We Hit Them?

A researcher named Rod Stevens reviewed many properties across town, clustered them together, and created different housing production scenarios for each of them.

You can find the results in this Excel sheet and Word doc.

What he found was that we have plenty of room to build a more inclusive and affordable town.

Let’s take Obey Creek (the forerunner of the new South Creek neighborhood) as an example.

The Obey Creek analysis shows 158 acres total made up of three different parcels: a 121-acre parcel, a 5-acre parcel, and a 32-acre parcel.

For each of those parcels, Stevens identifies a low, medium, and high density scenario. For example, for the 121 acre parcel, 5 homes per acre would be the low density scenario, 8 homes per acre would be the medium density scenario, and 11 homes per acre would be the high density scenario.

If you think “11 units per acre doesn’t sound very dense,” you’re right. And you can see why in the Word doc:

Out of 121 acres, only 40 were included in the development proposal, and only 28 of those were intended to be developed.

So, returning to the spreadsheet, on the 121-acre parcel, the low density scenario called for 650 homes, the medium density scenario called for 975 homes, and the high density scenario called for 1,300 homes.

Since the actual proposal called for developing just 28 acres, that translates to 23 homes per acre, 35 homes per acre, or 46 homes per acre.

Another area Stevens studied is what’s known as the “Gateway” area. This includes the former Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters, or as some of us like to call it, the spaceship.

His calculations suggested that this 43-acre property could be developed at 30, 35, or 40 homes per acre (low, medium, or high scenarios), which would produce anywhere from 1,002 to 1,336 homes.

As you can see in the table below, Stevens performed these calculations for multiple potential large projects across Town:

The total capacity from these large assemblages ranges from 23,867 homes in the low production scenario to 50,468 homes in the high production scenario.

There are a few assumptions I question — why UNC would ever develop Finley Golf course, for example, or why the possibility for new housing in downtown is so small.

But this is an approximation, not an actual development proposal. There is no researcher out there who can tell us exactly how many new homes we are going to get. What this gives us is a realistic ballpark for what we can build.

Recent Housing Trends

On the Town’s Active Development webpage, you can see 59 active exploratory projects and a much shorter list of 6 projects with construction starting soon or recently started.

Of those 6 projects, one is a cell tower and one is a medical office building. That leaves 4: Tanyard Branch Trace, Chapel Hill Crossing, Gateway/Meridian Lakeview, and 2200 Homestead Rd. We’re not quite getting as much housing as we would want to hit the best case scenario.

One neat fact: South Creek, which is opening its first building, plans to include a daycare as part of its commitment to a mix of commercial and residential space. That’s a welcome change for a community facing a shrinking elementary school population.

How to Do Better

The Town needs to engage in a process called small area planning.

We know what our housing production goals are. We know we want new homes to be designed in such a way that their residents can easily use greenways, sidewalks, and buses. We want to sprinkle businesses that can serve as third places or provide useful retail to residents across town. And we want to improve the management of stormwater runoff across the entire town.

A small area plan makes clear exactly what the town is looking for. It attracts more and higher quality developers to compete for the opportunity to build here.

We know this is true because it’s already happened. Small area planning led to the creation of Southern Village, one of Chapel Hill’s most popular neighborhoods. Southern Village has a range of housing types, top-tier trail access, a park, a school, a bus route, and commercial activity.

You can read about the history of its creation here.

Although Southern Village is popular now, the article notes that residents vociferously opposed its creation, delaying the project by about three years. I cannot think of a single person today who thinks Chapel Hill would be better off without Southern Village and all the people in it.

I sometimes hear from constituents who feel that the spirit of Chapel Hill is really mostly about how it looks. It’s entirely possible to get aesthetically popular 2-8 household buildings for neighborhoods. I hope that more small area planning might help us get better aesthetic outcomes, like Southern Village, because we need big buildings no matter what. They play a vital role in creating and maintaing an affordable, inclusive town. They also help to pay for the services and amenities that people expect us to provide.

If we do more small area planning, the key is to endorse plans that are feasible. Small area planning won’t change the fact that investors are involved in the housing market. It won’t change the fact that we have to work with big firms for some projects. And it may not change the reality of what it costs to build today.

Small area planning can easily be perverted to set unattainable goals. Those kill housing production, increase the cost of living, and destroy the community’s confidence.

It's a delicate balancing act. But it is our responsibility as elected officials to live in the real world and use the values that got us elected to pick from the options in front of us.

I think we’re up to the task.

The median income in North Carolina is $74,000. Most financial planners (and the federal government) say that your housing is “unaffordable” if it costs more than 30% of your income. That means the median North Carolina household can pay no more than $22,200 per year, or $1,850 per month, on an “affordable” mortgage.

In the 2025 property revaluation, the county found that the median sale price in Chapel Hill was $756,250. That means that the median home in Chapel Hill cost more than 10 times the annual income of the median North Carolina household.

To avoid paying for private mortgage insurance, you need to put 20% down. That translates to a down payment of $150,000 on a median Chapel Hill purchase.

Even then, the monthly payment would be over $4,000 — 2.16x what the median NC household can afford to pay on a mortgage.

For a $4,000 mortgage to be affordable, you’d need an income of $13,333 per month — or $160,000 per year.

With just 36% of North Carolina households breaking $100,000 per year, that puts home ownership in Chapel Hill out of reach for most North Carolina families.

Chapel Hill’s Outdated Housing Policy Helped Create This Problem

Chapel Hill hasn’t had much for-sale housing most years. What little it has had has been pretty expensive.

We know that about 75% of Orange County’s population growth in recent years has been 65+. The majority of North Carolina’s population growth has been driven by migrating retirees, but Orange County’s growth in that category is a solid 20% higher than the statewide figure.

That’s largely a function of how expensive our real estate is. And our high prices were exacerbated by how few types of for-sale homes we’ve encouraged.

From 2000 to 2020, Chapel Hill produced very little housing of any kind.

Because Chapel Hill has been a highly desirable place to live, land values have gone up. And because there have been people willing to pay really high prices for what little housing goes on the market, the projected value of everybody’s homes has gone way up.

That’s good news for sellers. It’s bad news for everybody else.

Another factor contributing to cost increases: teardowns and rebuilds. Because our rules only allow you to build large lot single family homes, many existing single family homes have been torn down and replaced with bigger, more expensive single family homes.

Here are two illustrative examples, one in Carrboro, the other in Chapel Hill (even though both addresses say Chapel Hill):

In recent years, the Town Council has responded to the extremely high cost of housing, and to the increasingly lopsided demography that results from it, by saying yes to more kinds of housing.

Below, you can see two new townhomes in different neighborhoods. Both are cheaper than the countywide median sale price of $530,000. Both are significantly cheaper than the median sale price in Carrboro ($700,000) and Chapel Hill ($756,250). And both are located inside of Chapel Hill — Orange County’s most expensive real estate market.

A $430,000 home would require an $86,000 down payment to avoid private mortgage insurance. That’s $64,000 less than the down payment on the recent median sale in Chapel Hill.

The mortgage itself would run $2,450 per month — still more than the median North Carolina household can afford, but $1,550 cheaper than the monthly mortgage payment on the recent median sale in Chapel Hill, and affordable to a household making $98,000 per year.

Homes like these are proof that it is possible to create more attainable homes in Chapel Hill—that we can, through a mix of new market rate housing types and subsidized low-income housing, achieve a diverse, demographically balanced community of people with all sorts of incomes.

We Can Keep Moving Toward Balance If We Write Our New Rules Well

It’s not just townhomes that can accomplish this. Right now, there’s nothing protecting our neighborhoods from super-expensive teardowns that replace existing homes with bigger, much more expensive single family homes. Those teardowns increase property values for everybody else, driving tax bills up.

The Town Council can use the upcoming LUMO rewrite—a period every couple decades when our staff work with outside experts to do a comprehensive update to our land use rules—to create compelling alternatives that would route some of this development activity in new, less expensive directions.

Townhomes are a form of what planners call “attached” single family housing. “Detached” single family housing is what you see in suburbia on TV (or in most of our neighborhoods). Attached single family homes are older, more historical. They date back to an era before suburbs existed.

Attached single family housing makes it possible to get homes at attainable prices in beautiful neighborhoods. It’s the secret to breaking the cycle of teardowns and super-expensive single family new builds.

As we reform our land use policies to make home ownership more attainable and our community more diverse, we’ll work to ensure that the people in those homes can safely and conveniently access schools, workplaces, business, and public spaces—like our woods, trails, and parks.

That’s exactly what residents in the new homes along Homestead Road will get, with safe and convenient access by bike and on foot to the Carolina North forest.

A lot of the townhome developments we’ve seen so far have been part of large lot development.

But it’s possible for us to get groups of five or ten townhomes on smaller parcels. And it’s possible to slowly add 2-4 household homes to existing neighborhoods, one lot at a time, in ways that keep our neighborhoods leafy and green while also creating more attainable prices.

We Can Preserve the Spirit of Chapel Hill—But Only if We Change its Appearance.

The choice facing us now is whether to stay on a path that encourages expensive teardowns and rebuilds, or to get onto a path that that make prices attainable and restores demographic balance to our town.

I know which route I want to be on!

To make ends meet, the district plans to close schools.

The School Board and the County Commission oversee the district’s budget. I know what it feels like to agonize over fiscal tradeoffs while trying to achieve the public good. I sympathize with them, and I make no comment here about what they should do.

Instead, I want to point out that most of our problems are downstream of a deeply irresponsible state-level approach to government funding—one which has imposed artificial scarcity on local governments that are trying to balance the widespread demand for reliable, high-quality services and facilities with antipathy for property taxes.

Back in 1994, families and five school districts filed a lawsuit, Leandro v. State of North Carolina, against the state of North Carolina, arguing that they did not receive sufficient resources to provide children in their districts a sound, basic education. The case meandered through court for the next thirty or so years before the NC Supreme Court got fed up and ordered the legislature to meet schools’ financial needs.

The result was the Leandro Plan, a comprehensive, multi-billion-dollar plan intended to guarantee every child that sound, basic education.

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district is one of the most lavishly funded districts in the state, but even we would have seen funding gains under the Leandro plan. In fact, according to a 2022 tool, the district would have seen an estimated 30% increase in state funding under the plan—an additional $23.3 million.

Had that taken place, the conversations in our district would no doubt be very different.

Unfortunately, as soon as the Republicans gained control of the Supreme Court, they began rehearing cases with unfavorable rulings and issuing new ones. One of the cases they reheard was the Leandro case. More than two years later, we’re still waiting for a ruling—and the funding has been held in limbo, even as the state legislature continues to slash state revenues and pilot us toward a statewide budget disaster.

Knowing the history of our financial woes can’t save us from hard short term choices. But I think it’s important to remember who forced these choices on us. We can, and should, build more housing in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It will create more demographic balance, more attainable prices and affordable rents, and ease some of the financial pressure on our tax base. If we can’t replenish the schools fast enough to dodge this hit, the lion’s share of the blame should go to the Republicans’ deferral of the Leandro plan and their ongoing effort to subsidize the wealthy with irresponsible tax cuts.

Since then, I’ve visited other homes that also experienced flooding, including one this past weekend.

I’ll say from the outset that there’s a difference between managing stormwater runoff and preventing flooding during a disaster like Chantal, which had a 0.1-0.2% chance of occurring. The reality of our topography confronts some of our neighbors every time it rains, and others only in the most severe storms. Many of our neighborhoods were built decades ago with no or low runoff infrastructure. Those located next to streams or ponds, on steep slopes, or at the bottom of hills, gullies, and ravines are in a tough situation.

There are no magic solutions. The solutions we do have can mitigate, but not eliminate, flooding. And the most effective strategies—major infrastructure projects and property buyouts (which amount to relocation assistance for residents)—are only possible with state and federal support because of their enormous costs.

Nevertheless, there are things we have done, and can still do, as a town to reduce runoff in certain places, provide resources to residents, and potentially even defray costs for small-scale, private runoff mitigation.

Here’s what that looks like.

The Issues

Broadly speaking, there are two types of runoff issues: watershed-level issues and site-specific issues. Watershed-level issues exacerbate site-specific issues.

If your sink fills faster than it drains, it will overflow. This is basically how flooding works. If the ground gets saturated, water pools; if drainage tanks fill faster than they can pump water out, they back up. When streams, ponds, and lakes overflow, that water has to go somewhere.

Topography dictates where.

Chapel Hill is, well, hilly. There are homes in really disadvantageous places—places where nature and physics work against residents.

Most of our single family home neighborhoods were built decades ago without sufficient infrastructure to handle their own runoff. Many neighborhoods have lawns, buildings, and pavement that don’t drain very well, plus old and inadequate drainage systems. When those systems get overwhelmed, water collects in low places. Some of those places are also people’s homes.

What We’re Doing

The legislature has delegated authority to municipalities to require stormwater control features. Thanks to some 2024 amendments, the town now requires all significant redevelopment projects to meet a 100-year storm requirement, meaning they must build facilities on site to temporarily capture, treat, and safely release the calculated runoff produced by a storm that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year. For comparison, most of our older neighborhoods were built with drainage systems rated at most for a 10-year storm (a storm with a 10% chance of occurring during the year).

That means that, in general, new development dramatically improves site-based stormwater management over its previous condition.

The Town staff anticipate bringing an updated stormwater plan before the Council this spring. That plan should provide a cost/benefit analysis of large stormwater infrastructure projects, which was the primary focus of the Town’s previously approved stormwater plan from 2014.

After the 2014 stormwater plan was paused, a previous Council charged the Booker Creek Working Group with making recommendations to the Town. One of their recommendations is that the Town explore providing technical assistance and cost-sharing programs for individual property owners to mitigate runoff from their properties that contribute to watershed-level flooding.

What Other Communities Do

Mecklenburg County runs a program open to residents in the City of Charlotte and in unincorporated Mecklenburg County that provides technical assistance to residents and covers 75% of the cost (up to $7,500) of approved improvements that “reduce runoff, stop erosion and address other non-point source pollution issues.”

The City of Raleigh has a similar program that covers 75% of the cost (90% in a few high priority areas) of site improvements.

Next door, Carrboro ran a Residential Assessment Pilot Program (RAPP) in 2023 and is now launching a Watershed Residential Assistance Program (WRAP). Their program provides residents with free technical assistance and cost-sharing if they install an approved improvement (see cost sharing scoring rubric here).

One sort of intervention that might offer mild improvements to flooding is the bioswale. It’s hard to say it better than NACTO: “bioswales are vegetated, shallow, landscaped depressions designed to capture, treat, and infiltrate stormwater runoff as it moves downstream.”

Raleigh offers a number of examples of other “green infrastructure” programs, like rain gardens, pervious pavement (a type of pavement that allows rainwater to soak through to the ground beneath it), large cisterns, and green roofs.

These are neat small-scale interventions. However, it’s important to recognize their limits: as the FAQ for the Raleigh rainwater program points out, these types of upgrades cannot address “stormwater system issues” and can really only mitigate “nuisance flooding.” They can’t protect homeowners who would flood in a storm like Chantal from flooding again. In fact, the improvements are generally expected to capture “the first inch of rain.”

Reducing nuisance flooding is worthwhile. But it’s important that we be clear-eyed about the limitations of these small-scale interventions. The rainfall that fell during Chantal had anywhere from a 0.2 to 0.1% chance of occurring in a year. Neither green infrastructure nor massive engineered basins can protect every property in town from flooding under those circumstances.

Limitations

I hate writing this section, because it means confronting once more how the backwards approach to taxation at the state and federal level harms our local communities, and confronting how many legal restrictions the state legislature puts on our ability to help our constituents.

Our state income tax is low and flat, and what money we have is being diverted to boondoggles like the voucher program, which will divert billions in appropriations from our public schools up front, and then take millions more on the back end (since additional legislative funds are tied directly to the number of enrolled students per school, every child who transfers out of public school takes money with them).

Our communities need a way to prepare for and adapt to the new normal of climate change. That preparation is going to be expensive. But neither the feds nor the state government are creating programs today that will provide the skills, the outreach, and the money to meet a public interest in public safety from harm.

Local governments can’t do it on their own. We were reminded of that in the aftermath of Chantal: we lacked the funds and the legal authority to unilaterally buy out and close properties that flood every time there’s a big storm, like Camelot (location).

There are also state restrictions on the amount of town funds that can go to individual property improvements, which limits our ability to help people who, through no fault of their own, have flooding issues that are confined to their property and don’t create runoff problems for others.

Next Steps

Whatever we do will cost money. Chapel Hill collects a stormwater fee of $40.27 per year for each 1,000 square feet of impervious surface on a property. It’s worth investigating the legality of a more precisely calibrated sliding scale, but the fee scales in a linear fashion.

The UNC School of Government built a dashboard comparing two different quantities: the revenue per capita that different towns receive from stormwater, and the revenue they derive from different size properties.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to celebrate here for neighborhood residents: large buildings are paying lots of money into the stormwater fund, while neighborhood homes—which are the major contributors to our stormwater issues—are paying much less than they would in other towns.

In the gallery below, you can see that the fee levied on 6,000 square feet of impervious surface in Chapel Hill is one of the most expensive in the state. The fee leveled on a 2,000 square foot home—a good proxy for most of our residential neighborhoods—is only slightly above the median.

Chapel Hill’s revenue per capita from the stormwater fee is $54.

Collecting more stormwater funding could enable us to qualify for debt-financed, watershed-level stormwater improvements. But the place to get it would most likely be from neighborhood homes. Past iterations of Council have balked at the engineering solutions proposed to combat system-level stormwater issues, since these generally require large basins and often involve taking out trees, which all of us hate to see happen.

I don’t yet have an updated report to see what the latest cost/benefit analyses propose, but even the biggest system-level interventions won’t be able to control all of the runoff generated by disaster-level storms. What remains to be seen is just how much of it they can control.

Every politician has a unique combination of driving forces. You can imagine mapping every possible motive onto a radar chart (also known as a spider chart) and developing a representation of each person’s character.

If you’re reading this in a moment of leisure, have a think about what words come to mind to describe the motives of powerful people. Below, you’ll find five primary motives under which I think other driving forces can be classified. There are lots of ways to arrange these motives, and I’d be interested to know what words you find missing, or how you’d arrange them differently.

Ego

Everyone has an ego. People who run for office are no different. It takes a healthy sense of self-worth to compete for and to assume leadership. The desire for control, power, status, and attention are all manifestations of ego—as is the willingness, or desire, to express oneself.

All of those desires can be helpful in moderation. If you care about control, you’ll be invested in decision-making when it really counts. If you care about power, you’ll learn how to actually make things happen. If you care about status, attention, and expressing yourself, you’ll be willing to use your platform as a role model and a messenger. We need people who are willing to lead, and leading requires confidence (a much more appealing word than ego).

Leading also requires humility. When the ego gets out of whack, it can create conflict between board members, unrealistic expectations for personal control over processes and outcomes, and blindness to one’s own biases and to others’ expertise. It can make it harder to hear new perspectives or to absorb surprising new information (what statisticians refer to as updating your priors). It can make you seek power to feel powerful rather than to do good things.

If you’re following this Substack, or watch any of my videos, then you’ll know that I feel compelled to express myself in the public forum. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about whether I wrestle more with an excess or absence of ego!

Ambition

Ambitious people have a strong desire to achieve or accomplish something. That something can be positive or negative. People with a clear agenda or a core set of issues have ambition—they have things they want to fix or get done. There are also people who simply want to be successful. To go back to ego, some folks have ambition, but their ambition is simply to acquire status. I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately reading Robert Caro’s astounding biography of LBJ, an incredibly detailed portrait of a supremely ambitious man fixated almost entirely on his own status.

I like people who have clear policy agendas and clear positions on issues—or at least, I like the ones whose issues and goals aren’t morally repulsive to me—and I have a harder time connecting with people who don’t have have pretty specific goals on a few particular issues. I especially like people with lots of curiosity, which is a key ingredient for good conversation and for good, open-minded governance.

For me, affordability is an overriding concern. Because I’m on the town council, I write a lot about housing. I’m also pretty interested in convenient, affordable transportation; the two are intimately connected.

How we handle our housing and our transportation directly impacts our environment, as does where we get our energy—and how we get our energy is itself closely tied to affordability, and to our international independence.

When I was involved in the graduate student government, I was very focused on fair wages and pretty interested in more abstract questions about how to design our education system to maximize human flourishing. Though my interests have narrowed temporarily to match my very limited powers (on the town council) and our finite legislative influence (at Carolina Forward), one of my favorite things about my day job and about my electoral office is that both hold the promise of many important and morally fulfilling new fields of inquiry and activity.

Naïveté

Take a little naïveté, a heap of ambition, and a healthy dose of ego, and you’ve got yourself a candidate. That was my configuration, at any rate. There are other recipes.

I’m sure there are candidates who are clear-eyed, level-headed, and intricately familiar with the inner workings of the machines they’re trying to influence, but the truth is that our world is so immensely complicated, it’s hard even for seasoned politicians to escape a little naïveté when they enter a new arena.

I certainly had it when I first ran for office. I’ve seen that innocence turn to experience in my political contemporaries, and I have to imagine (and certainly hope!) that people who are watching me have observed a similar sort of change.

What one wants is not the mere loss of innocence so much as the development of wisdom. When I have felt most like I am growing is when I am moving patiently and judiciously. If you’ve practiced an instrument or played a sport, you’ll know the feeling: it’s one I first knew intimately as a violinist and as a squash player.

Money

Some people really do go into politics to get rich, I guess. I haven’t met anybody like that yet, except that one time I rode in an elevator with Tim Moore at a UNC football game.

Making money is the only motivating force on this list that seems purely bad to me. That said, I think politicians should be paid a living wage.

The salary for our state legislators is about $14,00 per year. When you add in mileage reimbursements and the daily stipend (“per diem”) that they receive when the legislature is in session, their total compensation might reach $30,000 or so. It’s no wonder that career and income diversity is hard to achieve—only the independently wealthy or those with lucrative, flexible jobs can run without jeopardizing their financial security.

Power and money go hand in hand, so it’s vitally important that we develop a system that bans political profiteering, builds some serious guardrails, and equips independent watchdogs to investigate and punish corrupt politicians.

None of my career choices have been primarily motivated by the hope of making lots of money. From my childhood dreams of becoming a professional violinist to the English professor phase of my twenties through the current course of public service, nothing I’ve done has had much chance of being lucrative. But there are other compensations. My life is interesting and fulfilling; my friends are kind and thoughtful. I sleep very well at night.

Service

A lot of elected officials—certainly the ones that I know—are powerfully driven by a sense of morality. That morality manifests as an impulse to serve. There are more ways to serve, of course, than running for and holding office. Service requires some sacrifice (time, privacy, money, thought, emotion), but it scratches an itch that is, for the servant, impossible to ignore.

Each person’s approach to service falls somewhere on a sliding scale between very abstract and very particular. Both approaches have value, and drawbacks.

The abstract approach to service treats power as a means to some good end. People who view service in this way are looking for utilitarian answers to problems. They like data and objectivity, and they want to spend their time figuring out what does the most good for the most people.

The particular approach to service is all about representation. Representatives channel everything through their relationships: with specific people, with places, with the idea of a community, with a history. They’re driven by what they’ve heard from specific people, by wanting to help specific people, and they think there’s more to making choices than just finding the right numbers.

Both are helpful. In a world of functionally finite resources, we need people who will look at numbers and figure out where the dollars they control can do the most good. We need people who think about what doing the most good means, and for whom it is to be done. And we need people who connect with, and surface, individual experiences, so that the tyranny of the majority will not license atrocities against some small minority.

Here’s what can go wrong in each approach.

The utilitarian, who lives at the level of abstraction, runs the risk of losing touch with people’s feelings. Losing touch with people’s feelings means losing track of the political Overton window, but it can also make it hard to know what to do when the choice isn’t between a great option and a terrible option, but between two good options or two bad options.

On the other hand, the representative runs the risk of being driven too much by individual experience—by personal connections, by personal history, by the voices of the few who happen to find them—and not by a truth which can be found only in aggregation.

People are self-interested creatures. Each of us can hold only a very little bit of information at once, yet we live in a world that can most accurately be described by unfathomably enormous quantities of information. We have lots of wonderful tools to interrogate the data of our world, and we must be careful not to let the people we know and the stories we hear outweigh all the experiences we don’t encounter and stories we don’t hear. That’s when data helps to flesh out a more comprehensive picture of reality.

My natural instinct is to hope that most political decisions will somehow be math problems, for which there is a right answer. Sometimes our decisions really are that simple. Other times, they are not.

That’s the business of leadership.

Fear

This wasn’t in my original list. It didn’t occur to me. Rather, I saw it in Graig Meyer's essay this morning:

A naivete that I carried into politics more than 12 years ago was that if you elect good people, they will do the right thing. My time in the General Assembly has long since disabused me of that idealism. No matter their party, most politicians are subject to the deeply human motivation of fear… fear of disapproval, fear of failure, fear of loss. And those fears stop good people from doing hard things. Think about it this way: when advocates come to me with a problem they want to solve, my advice to them is generally not that they just need to explain the problem in a way that will ensure politicians will do the right thing - rather, I advise them on how they can build political pressure that will make politicians do the right thing.

He's right! Politicians are very motivated by fear. Fear of how they'll be perceived, fear of losing, as he says “status, power, and access.” Will saying this or voting for that cost me an election? Will telling the truth about my own personal views turn off this donor whose money I need? Is making an unpopular but morally good choice here worth potentially losing office, and thus losing the ability to make a more important moral choice later?

Politicians face choices like that all the time.

That fear is mostly a matter of self interest. It’s also often wrong. In my experience, the best way to overcome the type of fear that stands between you and a moral choice is to express it to friends whom you trust.

Good friends will shoot you straight on what they think the right thing to do is. Wise ones might even be right.

My first reaction was, I confess, weariness. Another think piece about the Democrats? But this mentor is pretty important to me, so I opened the link and started reading. Boy, am I glad that I did! I found in it inspiration for how to organize my thoughts about political issues. Yesterday, I shared it in a speech before a great group of Buncombe County Democrats down in Asheville.

After thinking a little more, I’ve amended my original thoughts, which named four key points, to five. Here’s how it works.

The Five-Point Framework

This entire framework rests on five simple words:

1. Values

2. Villains

3. Positions

4. Plays

5. Stands

Values are the big doorway. They’re how we connect, at the highest level, with the aspirations people have for themselves and their communities. Here are three values that I think resonate with lots of people: freedom, fairness, and pride.

The Villains are the people working against our values. I’ve been slow to adapt to the importance villains play when telling a story, but it’s clearly true. Look at Josh Stein’s massive victory over Mark Robinson. He was helped because Robinson was an almost cartoonish villain (the sex forum scandal, the daycare scandal, his claim to be a “Black Nazi” ).

Positions are what you get when you combine values with issues. Take hunger, for example. We should be free from hunger. It’s unfair for some people to go hungry while others are buying their third luxury yacht. Eradicating hunger is a matter of local and national pride.

Positions can be even more specific, and Democrats sometimes get tripped up writing 70-page policy briefs when people are looking for clear, simple positions.

Plays are the paths you follow to realize your positions. They’re how you go from platitudes (‘life should be fair’) to policies.

For example, Duke Energy has an effective monopoly on our electricity. The utilities commission was created to protect consumers and ensure that electricity prices were fair. But it has been corrupted. Duke Energy pays off the legislature, and the legislature used its authority to steal the appointment power from the Governor and use it to put in people who would rubber-stamp Duke’s egregious price gouging.

The play here is to fix the law so that the utilities commission is a non-political entity. Empower professional staff to actually protect consumers. Give them the authority and the resources that they need. Put a legal cap on the maximum profit extraction. If the agency’s employees won’t live up to their obligation to protect us, fire them and replace them with people who will.

The last piece of the framework is the Stand. It’s important for politicians to take visible stands because it signals that they are fighting. That’s what people want to see today, and it’s important for people who talk about politics to draw connections between values, values, positions, plays, and stands.

In the government shutdown, Democrats blocked action in order to force Republicans to leave healthcare intact for millions of Americans. The Texas Dems famously fled the legislature to break quorum, delaying the Republican gerrymander, before other Democratic states retaliated by redrawing their own maps. Attorney Generals across the US keep suing the Trump admin and winning (like Jeff Jackson). Some local governments have recently passed data center bans.

Here are a few other positions that I think are worth adopting:

• fair compensation for your work

• fair prices (whether that’s utilities or medicine or concert tickets or housing)

• fair shot at a sound, basic education

• freedom from poverty (from hunger and homelessness, in particular)

• freedom from danger (natural disasters, in particular)

• freedom from corruption

I think living in a fair, free society is deeply tied to our sense of local, state, and national pride. Are we the kind of country that proactively helps people prepare for a future with more storms, more flooding, more ice, and more droughts? Are we committed to ensuring that no children go hungry or unhoused, that no adults die because their medicine is too expensive? Are we committed to free public schools that hold our children to high standards — and have the resources to help every child achieve success?

There are other values you can use to structure your positions.

What are some values and positions that you hold? Who are the villains in the way, and what plays would you use to beat them? Have you seen any stands lately that inspired you? Let me know!

I don’t like the idea of moving the Dean Dome. But it’s worth being invested in more than just the fate of Dean Smith’s legacy. The rest of the Carolina North development, if done right, could be a gamechanger for UNC employees who want to live in town, but can’t find attractive options at prices they can afford. Changing that would make our town more diverse and our community more vibrant. For that to happen, the University will need to calculate the affordability of the proposed housing more carefully than its current documents propose.

Rewind Twenty Years

UNC undertook a major community planning process in the early 2000s to determine the future of the Carolina North property. The result was the 2007 Carolina North Plan, which called for 250 acres of land to be developed over 50 years. The first phase, which was envisioned to play out over fifteen years, would have included 2,475,000 square feet of space, including a new law school, a new school of public health, medical offices, multiple research centers and institutes, and about 500,000 square feet each of corporate partner space and housing.

Unfortunately, 2007 was the year before 2008, and 2008 was the year that the Great Recession hit full swing. The plans were shelved. By the time the economy had turned around, Republicans were in control of the General Assembly and major capital appropriations for new UNC projects faced a much more hostile environment.

But Chancellor Roberts served as the state budget director for Pat McCrory (one of only three Republican Governors in the last hundred years) and appears to be on much more favorable terms with the increasingly and outspokenly conservative Board of Trustees than Kevin Guskiewicz or his predecessors. Multiple international and cultural studies centers are out, as part of an $85 million hack-and-slash austerity budget, but all signs point to an aggressive schedule for campus expansion (not to mention the 5-year, $50 million contract for Bill Bellichick).

So the question is: how close will the new plans be to the 2007 plan?

The university’s first press release mentions 230 acres, not 250—so, a slightly smaller footprint than originally contemplated. Stephen Whitlow at the Triangle BlogBlog released some helpful visualizations of what that would look like, which you can compare to a visual from the 2007 plan.

I was interested to discover that the original plan contemplated a north-south alignment, concentrating development along the MLK corridor. This option was ultimately abandoned because it would have meant disturbing much more of the forest than the east-west alignment (shown above).

The 2007 plan was carefully integrated with local long-range transportation planning. I was interested to see that both the north-south campus and the east-west campus models in the 2007 plan treat a new north-south road as unavoidable and essential to the site’s functioning.

Housing

The 2007 plan says that “housing for graduate students, researchers, and faculty will be located throughout the development.” The 500,000 square feet called for in the first phase of development could be broken down in many different configurations. However, if you were to imagine it as a mix of studios for graduate students, small apartments for early career or low-income workers, and larger family housing, you could envision footprints of 750 square feet, 1,200 square feet, and 1,800 square feet. Assuming typical development patterns, you could probably get around 500 homes out of that space: say 270 studios, 170 small apartments, and 60 townhomes.

Chancellor Roberts has repeatedly underscore the importance of adding multiple types of housing. The university’s FAQ currently states that “the mixed-use component will include both student and multifamily housing” (i.e., apartments), “and rental townhomes are also under consideration.” The university is fully within its rights to prioritize employees for residence.

Longtime readers of this publication will know that one of the most important metrics to me is how many of our workers commute from outside county to get here for work. Only 31% of the people who live here work here, and only 26% of the people who work here live here.

If more of our workers did live here, it would help us combat declining school enrollment and add vitality to our community by countering some of our demographic imbalance: today, retirees account for 75% of our population growth. Plus, every dollar spent by Chapel Hill, UNC, and Carrboro on our free public transit would move more people, and there would be fewer cars on the road during rush hour.

But the current high-level plans would need to reckon more carefully with our real estate market for this to work. The current FAQ document says it will aim to provide 15% of the units available at or below 80% of the Area Median Income.

The median income for a family of four in our region is $126,200. A family of 4 at 80% of that would earn 92,500 per year. A household of two could earn no more than $74,000 to qualify.

For rent to be considered “affordable,” it could be no more than 30% of their total income — $27,750 for the family of four, $22,200 for the couple. That works out to a rent of $2,312 or $1,850 per month.

But both of those numbers are, in fact, higher than the current asking rent in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area. In other words, the proposed affordability for the Carolina North development would provide no lower rent than UNC employees can already find—which isn’t enticing them into Chapel Hill.

I would enthusiastically support a plan carefully calibrated to house UNC students and employees up and down the income spectrum. Such a plan would leverage a great opportunity to build a beautiful, inspiring new campus extension and weave a broader cross section of the campus community into the fabric of our Town. That carries all sorts of economic benefits, like capitalizing on our existing transportation investments and multimodal connectivity infrastructure, but it carries much more important cultural and community benefits. A more diverse Chapel Hill is a more robust Chapel Hill—one with a bigger, more diverse audience for beautiful places and interesting experiences.

We would all be better off for it. Right now, only the leaders at UNC have the power to make it happen.

The 15-year plan originally ratified in 2007 would have ended in 2022, so university leaders are pulling together a new committee to develop a new plan. Although the 2007-era Leadership Advisory Committee included representatives from the Town Councils of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, the Orange County Board of County Commissioners, and the Planning Commissions of each town, no representatives from any of the local governments have been named so far. Thanks to HB 926, which the legislature passed last year, UNC has also been exempted from local zoning authority.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t underscore the benefit of planning for really income-diverse housing that includes employees from every pay band at UNC.

You’ll be able to send in messages when their committee gets running, exercise peer-to-peer persuasion (or social pressure) on the UNC employees in your life, and show up in person to decisive meetings. You can even make a difference by spreading the word on social media about what a positive impact this development could make on the diversity of our community—if the university gets the housing portion right.

I am heartened by the Chancellor’s words about shared housing challenges. He is correct that this property could enhance the joint welfare of the university, its employees, and the town—if they get it right.

By coincidence, I’ve been reading about Black Southerners’ fight for voting rights under President Eisenhower. My source is volume three of Robert Caro’s tremendous LBJ series, and I’ve just reached the lynching of Emmett Till.

Caro quotes fourteen-year-old Anne Moody, for whom the murder awoke “the fear of being killed just because I was black.” These lines leapt out at me: “I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.”

I thought about what a friend texted me after Alex Pretti was killed: “they don’t care if we die…right now in this moment I think they’ll kill us all.”

Caro quotes Myrlie Evers, the former chair of the NAACP, whose husband was himself later murdered by a white supremacist, on the effect of Till’s murder. Evers identified a searing truth about the impact a murder can have when witnessed by a nation: “sometimes it takes those kinds of things to help a people become stronger and to eliminate the fear that they have to speak out and do something…because it said even a child was not safe from racism and bigotry and death.”

Eric Blanc recently interviewed Minneapolis organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay about how Minneapolitans have been resisting ICE. Shiney-Ajay describes what it’s like to live in a town where thousands and thousands of ordinary people—people who have never been activists, protestors, or especially politically involved—suddenly experience an unprecedented kind of solidarity. What, exactly, brings so many people off the sidelines?

Part of it is that getting involved starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up. Standing and recording with a phone was what we were first training everyone to do. Monarca Unidos, an immigrant group here, trained something like 24,000 people on legal observer roles: standing and recording with a phone.

Everyone was prepared to do that, and then that became risky. But it was an identity people had taken up — “I can stand here and record with a phone” — and people didn’t want to back away from that.

Another example is that delivering groceries to undocumented people who can’t risk going outside was floated as a low-risk thing you could do. But in the last week, ICE agents have started following around white people carrying grocery bags, because they think that will lead them to undocumented people.

So now the people delivering groceries — which again is a very low-risk thing—have been trained that if ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper.

That type of thing is motivating courage right now. What we’re doing is very basic: it’s giving people food and walking around recording on our cell phone. And when you’re not allowed to do that — when that becomes high-risk — there’s a sense of, my basic rights are being violated.

Obviously it’s harder to directly confront an ICE agent. That’s high-risk. But delivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

What Myrlie Evers recognized is what Aru Shiney-Ajay experienced: highly publicized murders push people to actively oppose injustice. When people experience an extraordinary assault on their rights and their dignity, when they feel that assault on their neighbors and on their community deeply, they seek redress. They are willing to take action. They find solidarity.

That is a difficult place to reach. And it takes a lot of suffering to reach it.

There is reason to hope that this momentum can cow the Trump administration into a retreat from its attack on life and liberty. To accomplish that, we need to coalesce around demands. I thought Ro Khanna’s list was a good place to start:

32 people died in ICE interactions in 2025. Eight have died so far in 2026, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE and DHS must be disbanded. It’s hard to hold agents accountable in ways that our obvious and intuitive sense of morality and justice compels us to look for, but ending their qualified immunity would be a good start.

It isn’t possible to be safe while ICE exists. The agency poses a real threat to American democracy. What they are doing is illegal, wrong, and illegitimate. They are a fascist paramilitary force operating outside the law—and taking advantage of the law’s inadequacy.

The future of America’s democracy depends upon rooting out these fascist agitators and their collaborators. They must be put on trial. Those found guilty must go to prison. They feel emboldened to kill. But they can be made timid, sullen, and small again. They can be disempowered. For us to disempower them, it is vital that we take every opportunity to stand up, to gather, to resist and to disobey.

What is there to do in North Carolina today?

You can use 5calls.org to call your representatives. Let them know you want ICE and DHS torn down and something new in its place. Demand that Stephen Miller, the racist architect of this policy of repression, resign.

I recommend that you read this interview about resistance techniques from Minneapolis. If North Carolina is subject to another surge in ICE activity, it will help to have examples. For instance, many businesses in Minneapolis have put up public signs saying that ICE is not allowed in their business. Volunteers have urged local governments to revoke operational permits for businesses that collaborate with ICE. They have coordinated round-the-clock noise disturbances outside of ICE hotels.

We need to refresh the many examples of civil disobedience not only in case ICE returns, but in case the Trump administration tries to impede our free and fair elections. If that happens, we need to be prepared to disrupt ordinary life—not because doing so in one city in one state will reveal their cowardice and make them back down, but because doing so in many cities across many states might.

Every participant betters our odds.

Here’s how the demographic makeup of Orange County is projected to change:

• the share of residents aged 0-17 will drop 1%

• the share of residents aged 18-44 will drop 3%

• the share of residents aged 45-59 will increase 1%

• the share of residents aged 60+ will increase 4%

This is part of an ongoing trend here and around the state, though it is slightly worse here than elsewhere.

Across the rest of North Carolina:

• the share of residents aged 0-17 will drop 1%

• the share of residents aged 18-44 will drop 2%

• the share of residents aged 45-59 will stay flat (0% change)

• the share of residents aged 60+ will increase 3%

As you can see from this data tracking 2010 to 2023, over just thirteen years, the proportion of Orange County residents aged 65+ grew 7%.

Put another way, more than half of North Carolina’s population growth is due to people aged 65+. That figure is much higher in Orange County, where 73% of our population growth is concentrated in the 65+ demographic.

This trend is a real challenge for North Carolina and for the country. Our ability to retire and live out our golden years in a functioning economy depends on the existence of new workers to take our places in the workforce.

Without sufficient workers, you’ll see shortages across all sorts of fields. That can mean small inconveniences, like fewer people to answer the phone or man a desk when you need to deal with life’s bureaucratic chores, or it can mean really serious consequences: fewer nurses, teachers, EMT technicians, in-home care workers, and so forth.

One of the classic solutions to a workforce shortage is to ease immigration restrictions. But the terror our current government is inflicting on people across the spectrum may cause people to think twice about trying to make a new life in the United States—to our nation’s detriment.

What’s fueling this trend?

It’s hard to prove why something is happening when it’s happening. So what I have to offer is an opinion and anecdotal observation.

There is a strong sense of economic malaise in the US. That sense of pessimism has deepened since the first Trump presidency.

Americans are no strangers to economic pessimism, of course. The University of Michigan has been tracking consumer sentiment for decades, however, and we haven’t seen such widespread dismay since the 1980s.

American fertility rates started dropping around 2007 and have declined more or less steadily since. Economic pessimism—a kind of economic shellshock, even—is probably just one contributing factor. But it’s one of the only factors worth targeting.

Consider: the rate of teenage pregnancies has dropped over time. That’s good. Access to contraception and competent sex ed grew steadily over time. That’s good, too.

Americans are marrying later in life:

And having children later:

While some of the change in age at first marriage and age at first birth are probably down to cultural factors, some of it is likely due to economic hardship and economic pessimism.

So it’ll come as no surprise to you, reader, that I think our city planning can play a small role in making it easier for people who want kids to feel more optimistic about it and to do it sooner.

No individual city’s zoning changes are going to dramatically reshape housing costs or alter American birth trends. But making things a little better is worth doing, and demonstrating leadership—a willingness to make changes to tackle a hard problem—can help to rebuild the public’s crumbled confidence in government and their shattered sense of optimism.

Shenandoah County’s ADU design competition

Shenandoah county has a population of 45,000 people and was recently awarded an AARP Challenge Grant. They decided to use it to fund a design competition for new ADUs (accessory dwelling units).

Contestants were asked to submit designs for one or multiple of ten participating properties across town whose owners had expressed interest in building a new ADU. You can see on the competition website not only the resulting designs but also, for several projects, projected costs: $231,000 for a one-story ADU with a loft or $380,000 for a full two-story ADU of 1,000 square feet on the same property, for example, or $194,000 for 680 square feet of house and another 200 square feet of covered patio.

UCLA’s worldwide design competition

Design competitions like this have been held for bigger buildings, too.

The city of LA, in partnership with UCLA’s cityLAB, has hosted a two-phase project called Small Lots, Big Impacts to blaze new trails in small-lot, neighborhood housing. The first phase was a design competition, which received 356 submissions from architects, designers, and students across 36 different countries. Their challenge was to design beautiful homes and outline a realistic path to financing, building, and selling them more affordably than typical market units today. You can view the submissions here (each of the images opens a pdf with a description and additional visuals).

The second phase of the LA project involved identifying small, under-utilized, city-owned lots to build on and securing financing to help defray the cost of building these pilot projects.

In a recent update, the organizers announced that the building process would begin with a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) in January 2026. The team has identified 12 sites across the city that could be developed, gone through the city to confirm site availability, and completed preliminary environmental reports, title reports, and preliminary appraisals. Developer teams will submit competing proposals for those sites. The city council is voting to finalize a financing model that will support the development of these sites, spending $2 million to defray pre-development costs for the teams.

The city gets new, beautiful homes and proof of concept for new designs on tricky lots that would otherwise go unbuilt. This competition could also help stimulate new aesthetic directions, development on tricky lots, and more appreciation for the amenities of a high-quality urban lifestyle.

Options for Chapel Hill

One thing I’ve heard before about Chapel Hill is that our hilly terrain and our many streams make it difficult to create a one-size-fits-all pattern book of pre-approved home designs. That may or may not be true. If it isn’t, then a design competition would reduce costs for anyone who opts in to using the patterns that emerge from such a competition.

If it is true, the competition still has value, because it spreads awareness of new home types that we’ve legalized and are encouraging people to build. It also creates aesthetic exemplars for people to point to and say “I want something like that” when they’re planning their own building.

There’s no need to limit ourselves to ADUs. It should be legal to build buildings that up to four households can live in (“quadplexes”) in every neighborhood in Chapel Hill. And design competitions for ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes would help turn our changes into a point of excitement for the whole town and even the Triangle region.

We can get a lot more neat, neighborhood-scale homes for sale in Chapel Hill as we make progress on revising our rules. We can also make them beautiful!

Perhaps it was karma, then, that led me to spend a week hunched over in the Folger’s basement, squinting and trying with limited success to decipher the recipes and personal correspondences of long-dead English writers.

My compatriots were a motley crew: grad students, professors, and hobbyists from the US and the UK, gathered for one week only to cut their teeth on some of history’s nastiest handwriting.

One of my colleagues was an itinerant Irish priest named Andrew. Each day we would wrap up, walk through the blustery streets of DC, enter the library, and peel off our layers, leaving everything but our pencils and paper in the Folger’s thin lockers before descending into the basement to do battle with penmanship.

Each day, Andrew arrived with this lovely, thick woolen scarf. It was the longest scarf I’d ever seen, divided in bands of grey, orange, and navy, and one day I told him how much I admired it. What happened next was astounding. He unwrapped the scarf, stretched out his arm, and said: “You like it? It’s yours, now.”

I was flabbergasted. But he seemed to be serious! And I remembered something wise my good friend Will once told me: if you believe that generosity is a virtue, you must give others the chance to practice it.

So I accepted the scarf.

Now, every time I wear that scarf, I think of Andrew and that one cold, wintry week in DC.

The point of this story isn’t that we should all be giving each other the clothes off our backs (although it does make for a memorable surprise!) And it isn’t that you should enjoy giving gifts during the holidays. It’s that the pleasure of a generous spirit is one that we should cultivate year-round, not just in our personal lives, but in our politics, too.

There is room at the inn. A bigger town is a richer town, and a town that remembers and succors those who have the least in it is a happier town than one in which only the misers thrive. Our holiday gift-giving rituals are meant to remind us that our happiness comes from our ties to each other, and that those ties can be built every day of the year—not just at the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

Since taking control of the legislature in 2010, Republicans have been engaged in extreme partisan gerrymandering. Those gerrymanders added three Republican seats and eliminated three Democratic seats in Congress, allowing them to seize control of the House. Back home, they allowed Republicans to nab 60% of General Assembly seats—despite winning only 50% of the votes cast for State House and Senate.

Republican make a lot of noise about voter fraud. As the Brookings Institution noted in 2024, there were just 39 fraudulent ballots cast over 30 years in Pennsylvania out of 100 million ballots. Only .0000845% of ballots cast in Arizona over the last 25 years were fraudulent. Voter fraud is basically nonexistent.

Yet NC Republicans have added stricter and stricter requirements instead of investing in systems that would maximize participation among eligible voters. They’ve created new photo ID rules for in-person and mail-in voting, reduced the window for mail-in voting, made it easier to disqualify eligible voters who use “one-stop” or “same-day” registration, and decreased the early voting period.

After the 2024 election, Republicans spent millions of dollars on a failed, fraudulent attempt to block the certification of Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs’ 734-vote win over Jefferson Griffin, who tried to throw out 60,000 legitimate votes after the election was over.

Following the election, Republicans usurped the Governor’s 100-year-old authority to appoint the majority of the state and county Board of Elections members and transferred it to incoming Republican state Auditor Dave Boliek.

Now, county boards in Guilford and Jackson counties have eliminated early voting sites from WCU, NC A&T, and UNCG.

I ran the Harris campaign’s college turnout program in 2024. NC A&T students vote for Democrats at the highest rate of any campus in the state, but WCU students vote at near-equal rates for Democrats and Republicans.

These Boards probably intend to cut into Democrats’ margins. Yet they’re willing to throw many of their own voters under the bus to do so, which speaks to a fundamental and blatant disrespect not only for young voters, but for democracy.

Republicans have brazenly disregarded the sanctity of free and fair elections over the last decade. These latest moves are nothing new. But they’re still worth your outrage.

I’m intimately familiar with the pseudo-science of arguments about bloodlines and race. My paternal grandparents immigrated from Germany after World War II. My grandmother worked in a hotel during the war, but her father was conscripted into the German army construction corps after refusing to join the Nazi party. My grandfather was also conscripted. After the war, he was asked by a Jewish family he had known before the war to move to Luray, Virginia—a town of 3,000 people at the time—to run their tannery. (The tannery, like so many industrial job sites across rural America, eventually shut its doors, ending my grandfather’s career.)

I wouldn’t be here if my grandparents hadn’t had to flee the disastrous consequences of a government committed to genocide and racial quackery. Now, the Vice President of the United States is on a national tour trying to revive this sort of nonsense.

Vance is using his claims about bloodline to argue not only for dramatically lower immigration thresholds, but for racial restrictions on who can immigrate. Klein prompted Newsom to articulate a different vision of what it means to be an American. Newsom’s answer was unpracticed and meandering. But as his answer wandered, I was struck by a critical parallel.

Newsom had just been talking about California’s effort to legalize more housing. That effort has proceeded in spite of determined opposition. Huge numbers of people who live in California’s cities today oppose building new homes for new neighbors. I was struck by a parallel between the stupid, cruel nativism of JD Vance and that opposition to new housing.

Both depend on false ideas: that people who got here yesterday are more important than people who want to come here today, and that if people come tomorrow, they will make life worse for everyone else.

These are deeply misguided beliefs. America is a nation of immigrants. Our nation’s wealth was built by enslaving people from other continents, bringing them here, and imposing the same fate on their children. After slavery ended, the world’s poor came here to dig through our mountains to build our railroads and work in our factories. We’ve reaped the benefits of other cultures’ food and music, not to mention their scientific expertise and technological creativity (where would NASA be without foreign scientists?)

Growing up, my oldest and best friend was the son of two Chinese immigrants. One was a doctor, the other a scientist; one diagnosed cancer, the other studied how to cure it. Their son got an MD and a PhD and is carrying forward their commitment to scientific discovery and medical excellence. Another friend was born to Italian immigrants, and now works alongside his father at MD Anderson in Texas.

Some people argue that America should take only the brightest and the wealthiest people from other countries and block anyone else. But we need immigrants of all kinds. New births are decreasing and populations are aging all over the world. Our economic dynamism is fueled by new people. New people don’t “take” jobs—they create them, along with economic demand for new goods and services. Without that growth, our communities get hollowed out and their futures grow dim.

That’s what’s happening to us now in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill’s population is getting older. 75% of our population growth now is in the 65+ demographic. We’re also seeing an increase in UNC’s undergraduate enrollment, but those students don’t stay when they graduate. They can’t. A household earning $100,000 can’t even qualify for a loan big enough to buy a median sale price home in Chapel Hill. As a result, we’re losing everyone between the ages of 22 and 65 to our neighboring counties.

And yet I hear all too often that there are too many people coming too fast. That’s an opportunity, not just for a stronger fiscal position for the Town, but for so many other things: more social connections, more cultural activities, more local workers, more local business, more food, more music, more fun. Changing our approach to land use and embracing new neighbors can help to strengthen the spirit of Chapel Hill, which I believe to be fundamentally open, diverse, creative, curious, and progressive.

This isn’t just a Chapel Hill issue. Across the state, communities demand affordability and oppose new homes and new neighbors. These are common impulses, but getting the affordability and the strong local communities that so many people treasure will require us to overcome those negative reactions. That’s why this parallel between the opposition to new housing and the opposition to new immigrants disturbs me so much. It’s an insidious natural impulse, one that can take hold of good people and allow bad people to exploit them.

America is bound for a future of weakness if we erect barriers to new neighbors. Chapel Hill is, too. Strength, prosperity, and success are ours to have if we accept and encourage change. The power bestowed by growth and vitality requires effort to manage and sustain. I find great wisdom and solace in the many strands of different spiritual traditions that warn us against clinging to the past and encourage us to focus on kindness, connection, and the inevitability of change. The familiar is beautiful and temporary. Its ephemerality gives us all the more reason to enjoy it today. Resisting tomorrow doesn’t stop it from coming—it just makes us unhappy now.

Nativism stands against new neighbors and argues for the superiority of those who were here yesterday over those coming today and tomorrow. It is a blight on our nation and a cancer on our communities—an impulse to be forgiven and healed, not celebrated or embraced.

Although only one third of North Carolinians rent their homes, nearly half of those renters are spending 30%+ of their monthly income on housing costs (this is called being “cost burdened”). Homeowners as a group are faring much better—only 11% are cost burdened.

In Orange county, we’ve sustained robust public services through responsible taxation while maintaining one of the lowest rates of cost burdened homeowners in the entire state—just 8.9%. The highest rate of struggle is in Bertie county, which you can see peeking out from behind the word “Carolina,” where 21.5% of homeowners are cost-burdened.

Homeowner households make much more money than renter households. In North Carolina, the median household income for homeowners is $102,000, while the median household income for renters is just $48,000. You can see how these two quantities have changed over time in the graph below.

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that inflation-adjusted rents have risen much faster than inflation-adjusted incomes for renters since 2001. Nationally, real median rent (that is, inflation-adjusted rent) grew 21% while real incomes grew just 2%.

Unfortunately, rents in North Carolina are outpacing incomes much faster than in the rest of the nation. As you can see in the graph below, real rents here have increased 42% while real incomes have increased just 3.3% over the same period.

I was eager to compare how real median home price in North Carolina has changed relative to real median income. Unfortunately, this information was not readily available. What I do know is that real median home values are up roughly 55% since 2014 (when the ACS began) and that real median income for all North Carolinians (including renters) is up roughly 10%. Homeownership is roughly 4-5% lower in North Carolina today than it was at the turn of the century, largely due to the 2008 crash.

The Takeway

Median housing costs for renters and owners are rising faster than median incomes. These high housing costs are pushing more and more households and families out of the middle class and into poverty. They’re also helping to enrich some Americans - perhaps 20% - faster than ever, while more and more of our neighbors slip into precarity or outright poverty.

How could we stop this?

Federally:

1. Rebuild the programs designed to keep our fellow Americans from going hungry or losing medical care. SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid provide benefits that many of our neighbors simply can’t pay for as their growing rents swallow their shrinking incomes.

2. Increase effective income by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit for the bottom 50% of Americans and cutting tax handouts for the top 10%. That means making those tax credits bigger, easier to access, and applicable to more households, while closing loopholes and eliminating big discounts for the wealthy and big corporations.

3. Rejuvenate American public housing, eliminate the Faircloth amendment, and make public housing mixed-income instead of segregating low-income Americans in isolated public properties.

At the state level, taxation reform and effective income increases are mostly downstream of a new legislature.

The path to that new legislature depends on winning back a Supreme Court majority by protecting Anita Earls’ seat in 2026 and winning at least 2 of the 3 Supreme Court seats up in 2028. With a new majority, the Courts can implement new, competitive state legislature maps. We’ll then need to win at least 12 new seats in the state House and 5 new seats in the state Senate and persuade state legislators

A new legislature could:

1. Institute different tax rates for different incomes

2. Restore corporate income taxation

3. Restore the state Earned Income Tax Credit

4. Create a state Child Tax Credit

5. Turbocharge the Housing Trust Fund

Even as those outcomes remain uncertain, there are opportunities to make small but meaningful progress on housing and transportation costs, the two biggest costs for most American and most North Carolinian families:

1. Develop within city limits as much as possible to maximize the locally-controlled public revenues (i.e., property and sales tax funding for city governments)

2. Legalize more housing types and more housing in general within city limits across the state (while disincentivizing low-density suburban sprawl)

3. Unify a coalition of pro-housing cities and towns around state public transit investments that would reduce household expenses and decrease traffic

If cities don’t take decisive action to legalize more housing—one of the few options available to impact costs in any way whatsoever—they run the risk of having their planning authority taken away by the legislature.

We should use every tool at our disposal today to fight the high cost of housing while making the case for how we could lower costs even more with a bigger toolkit tomorrow.