As housing market booms, Rocky Mount looks to take on inequality in home ownership
While the housing market in Nash and Edgecombe counties is hitting record highs, not everyone in Rocky Mount is seeing that success.
The city is now taking on a housing inequality problem that’s been generations in the making.
“It’s positive [that] we’re selling more houses than we ever have,” said Terry Stevens, the executive director of Rocky Mount Association of Realtors.
Realtors in Rocky Mount said the housing market has been exploding, with this year’s home sales across the area nearly double what they were back in 2015.
“We’re seeing a lot of people from Raleigh moving to the outer edge of our counties,” Stevens said.
There’s also been a surge in investment in the area and across the state, with economists saying that’s caused a shortage of available homes throughout North Carolina.
“Even though the pandemic has been a major issue for the economy globally, we are into a very heated housing market where houses are moving very rapidly when they go on the market,” Carolinas Gateway Partnership President Norris Tolson said. “That’s certainly true here in our area.”
But it isn’t true everywhere, with housing activists saying that only about 50% of people in Rocky Mount own their home, far below the statewide average of 65%, and that generations of geographic and racial inequality are to blame.
“It’s remarkable that there’s interest in Edgecombe County, because there hasn’t been for a long period of time,” said Susan Perry Cole, North Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations president and CEO.
Rocky Mount is split between majority-white Nash County and majority-Black Edgecombe County.
On the Edgecombe County side, Perry Cole said the lingering effects of segregation and lack of investment have left a gap in affordable housing.
“We think we can attract young families here if we start putting the investment tools in place,” Perry Cole said. “So, for people like me that have lived in one of these neighborhoods for 35 years, we have hope.”
Rocky Mount City Manager Rochelle Small-Toney said that nearly one in five Rocky Mount residents put more than half of their income towards housing.
“Housing is a very critical issue for the council,” Small-Toney said. “We’re hoping to address that in the very near future.”
Her plan is a series of affordable housing projects targeting low-income neighborhoods, which she proposed to pay for with $3 million the city’s set to receive as part of President Joe Biden administration’s American Recovery Plan.
“I would hope that we’re able to move forward initially with this $3 million to help create some additional housing for people here who desperately need it,” Small-Toney said.
Small-Toney said the Rocky Mount City Council could approve her housing fund recommendation by June, and then the projects will be planned out in more detail.
