The Future of the Unlocking Doors Initiative: A Preliminary Report for the Community Empowerment Fund

Gentrification and affordable housing remain among the most pressing political issues in Durham in 2018. Gentrification is the process by which urban neighborhoods experience renewed commercial and residential investment, causing increases in property values, rents, and the prices of everyday goods, and attracting populations with higher incomes who displace the original residents of the neighborhood. The cultural character of neighborhoods changes as long-time residents become strangers in their own communities.  Housing, especially in the rental market, becomes unaffordable to working-class and low-income populations who are forced to relocate further from the city’s interior where most amenities and services are concentrated. This process disproportionately affects the poor, working-class households, communities of color, and individuals with disabilities. Despite $1.7 billion of investment in Downturn Durham since 2001, the city’s overall poverty rate has climbed from 15% to 19% and only 38% of housing units in Durham are affordable to very low-income households.  Amid this housing crisis, a coalition of city officials, the Durham Housing Authority, and area non-profit organizations formed the Unlocking Doors Initiative (UDI) in 2016.

Recognizing that one aspect of Durham’s housing crisis was the inaccessibility of the area’s private rental market to households who received federal Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) or other rental subsidies, the Unlocking Doors founding coalition set out to recruit private landlords and property managers to “lease-up” more households who held a HCV. Partnering with Mayor William “Bill” Bell and local agencies support populations experiencing homelessness, the Unlocking Doors Initiative hosted community conversations and worked throughout the year to expand landlord partnerships. Now in its third year, having experienced tremendous growth, the Initiative must chart a future strategy that transitions its work in part from facilitating conversations to housing more families and individuals experiencing homelessness or who possess rental assistance subsidies.

This report’s key conclusion is that the Unlocking Doors Initiative must become an independent, adequately-funded organization with full-time staff in order to build a sustainable coalition of landlords & property managers, non-profit agencies, city officials, and the Durham Housing Authority all dedicated to housing populations ending their homelessness. UDI is currently being operated by a collaboration between Families Moving Forward and the Community Empowerment Fund, whose obligation to their primary organizational responsibilities hampers UDI’s future growth. Successful models of institutionally-supported landlord partnership programs across the country support this conclusion. The information presented in this report will elaborate on UDI’s present strengths and weaknesses and evidence that continued success as an independent organization is possible and desirable.

This report is organized as follows: (1) context and background for Unlocking Doors’ work in Durham, including an overview of Durham’s economic and housing market conditions and the City’s affordable housing policy priorities, (2) lessons from successful landlord partnership models and research literature, (3) a review of UDI’s work from 2016 to the present, (4) conclusions and area for future growth, and (5) limitations and areas where more research is needed.