Op-Ed: R. Lee Currie, Jr. : Congress Passed a Housing Fix. North Carolina Shouldn't Undo It
R. Lee Currie, Jr. is a former Executive Director of the North Carolina Republican Party and former Executive Director of the Foundation for Economic Education.
North Carolina is booming. People are moving here by the tens of thousands, drawn by jobs, weather, and the promise of more opportunity from the mountains to the coast. That growth is a gift, but only if our housing market can keep pace with it. Lawmakers have an obligation to ensure it does.
Across the state, communities are racing to keep up: new apartment complexes, cleared land ready for development, townhome communities, build-to-rent neighborhoods, and single-family rentals. Now is the time to hyper-focus on housing growth and accessibility.
Congress has already taken up this issue. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes a provision specifically designed to responsibly guide institutional activity in the single-family rental market. Federal lawmakers studied the issue, weighed the tradeoffs, and struck a careful balance.
Congress has acted. Every hour North Carolina spends re-litigating institutional investors is an hour not spent on the real drivers of housing costs in our fastest-growing metros – the reason working families are being priced out of safe neighborhoods with good schools.
The numbers make the stakes plain. North Carolina faces an estimated shortage of more than 750,000 housing units. Close that gap, and the state could unlock $489 billion in economic activity and nearly 2.2 million jobs. That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between a state that grows into its potential and one that prices out the very families powering its success.
Lawmakers should recognize the opportunity in front of them: unleash private capital, prioritize public-private partnerships, and foster housing growth in every corner of the state. When supply rises, homeowners and renters feel the relief in their monthly costs.
The small businesses and contractors who build our state stay busy, feeding an economy that depends on their work. That means rejecting proposals that make it harder for the people willing to build, renovate, and provide homes in North Carolina to do so.
Layering a state-level restriction on top of federal law does not benefit the state. Either it duplicates what Congress already did, sowing confusion for builders, lenders, and operators trying to follow two overlapping rulebooks, or it goes further than Congress intended, overriding a carefully negotiated bipartisan compromise with a blunter, less precise instrument.
The federal law deliberately carved out exemptions for build-to-rent development and renovate-to-rent strategies to address growing demand with solutions that will increase supply. A state bill drafted on a shorter legislative clock risks derailing progress at the federal level and throttling the very housing production North Carolina cannot afford to lose.
If lawmakers are serious about affordability, they don't have to look far for better places to spend their energy. Start with permitting. In fast-growing metros, sluggish approval timelines and restrictive local zoning significantly slow new housing supply. Every month of delay adds costs that ultimately flow through to rents and home prices.
Look at property taxes. Institutional investors own only a sliver of the state's single-family housing stock, but property taxes touch nearly every homeowner and renter in North Carolina. If lawmakers want leverage over affordability, this is where it lives.
Consider insurance. In coastal and storm-exposed regions – especially Western North Carolina, where communities are still rebuilding from Helene – premiums are climbing fast and taking affordability with them.
And look at construction costs – labor shortages and rising material prices are driving up the price of new housing, especially at the fast-growing edges of our metros, where development is most feasible and most needed.
These are the structural constraints actually holding back affordability in North Carolina. They deserve the full attention of the next legislative session.
Congress responded in a strong bipartisan vote to set guardrails on their involvement in the housing sector. It's time North Carolina stopped refighting a settled fight and started doing the harder, more consequential work of building the homes our state actually needs.
