The Charlotte Housing and Jobs Summit is all about growth

CHARLOTTE, NC (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The Charlotte City Council kicked off its two-day housing and jobs summit Monday night.

Charlotte’s rapid growth was a major topic of conversation, along with ways to address the challenges associated with growth.

The board heard from local experts about Charlotte’s growth over the past few years and how it affects our job and housing markets.

“We will see what has changed over the past 20 years. And what we need to think about now. We really, I think, need to adjust our policies and our investments because of the changes we’re seeing,” said Mayor Vi Lyles.

One of the main issues brought to the fore during the presentations is the need to increase the number of housing units to accommodate the growing population.

“These two years created a deficit; the deficit was 10,000 housing units in those two years alone,” Lyles said. “So if we want to catch up, it’s not like we’re just going to build another 10,000 housing units next year. We need to build 10,000 additional housing units to be able to fix this.”

Home prices in Charlotte have increased by 54% over the past two years, significantly higher than most cities of comparable size. Councilman Ed Driggs offered some reasoning as to why housing development hasn’t caught up with Charlotte.

“There were restrictions, supply restrictions and things like that,” Driggs said. “So we couldn’t, we just couldn’t. The builders could not do it. They could not get labor; there were problems in the material supply chain. So it wasn’t just a political decision, the market did everything it could and they fell short.”

The Council will meet again on Tuesday morning to discuss everything they have learned and heard from the community.

They hope the housing and jobs summit will guide their policy decisions about Charlotte’s continued growth.