Affordable Housing Bond Inclusionary Zoning Program

In 2021, the City of Raleigh adopted the Equitable Development Around Transit plan. The plan envisions a future Raleigh that grows more around transit and walkability than around driving. It also prioritizes ensuring that housing opportunities exist for households at a wide range of income levels.

Raleigh is working to meet that affordability goal in a few keyways:

• Investing directly in affordable housing, with resources such as the recent $80 million Affordable Housing Bond.
• Recent changes to the zoning code allow more housing to be built, so households aren’t forced to compete with each other for available homes, and legalizing more affordable housing types, such as apartments and townhomes, across the city

The affordable housing density bonus is another tool for achieving those goals. It works by allowing additional building height or density if a percentage of the additional units are available to rent at below-market rates. The term density is used here to mean the number of housing units that can be built in the same amount of land area.

Types of Bonuses

How much additional building density does the affordable height bonus allow? There are two types of bonuses.

1. Mixed Use zoning where apartment development is already allowed. In Mixed-Use districts, the number of apartment units is limited by the maximum building height. The affordable housing density bonus allows buildings to be 50 percent taller than the zoning would normally allow. Zoning in Raleigh sets a maximum height in stories for each zoning district. For a three-story zoned property, for instance, the bonus would allow for a five-story building, as the bonus is rounded up. For a five-story property, the bonus would allow eight stories, and so on.
2. Residential districts where the number of housing units is limited by the amount of land area. In those districts, the bonus would allow more units within the same-sized lot. For example, an apartment in R-10 needs to have 2,500 square feet of lot area for each unit in the apartment building. With the bonus, there only needs to be 800 square feet of lot area for each unit in the building. Put another way, an apartment that uses the bonus could have roughly 50 units on one acre of land. If no affordable housing is provided, the same one-acre lot could only have about 15 apartment units.

The bonus applies if the builder wants to have more density or height than the zoning would normally allow. They can still build under the normal density rules of the Mixed Use or Residential district and choose not to include any affordable units. 

Requirements

For a complete list of requirements and examples, please see the FAQ for Bond-Funded Inclusionary Zoning. 

Contact

If you have questions about the affordability requirements or monitoring, contact our Housing and Neighborhoods Department at 919-996-4330 or cd.info@raleighnc.gov.

If you have questions about the zoning itself, contact our Planning and Development Department at 919-996-2682 or planning@raleighnc.gov.