UNC Chapel Hill continues to face challenges housing the people who attend and serve the university, Chancellor Lee Roberts said Thursday.
Roberts said many of the university’s 10,000 or more employees must make long commutes from neighboring counties due to high rents and home prices in Chapel Hill.
Lee Roberts (Photo: Greg Childress/NC Newsline)“That obviously makes their lives more difficult and makes Carolina a less attractive place to work,” Roberts said. “We have a wide range of challenges housing all of the people Carolina is bringing to this area.”
Roberts’ comments came during Habitat for Humanity of Orange County’s first “Opening Doors Housing Summit” to discuss housing affordability in the region. The event was attended by dozens of elected officials, university officials, members of the housing industry and nonprofit leaders.
Thursday’s talk about housing affordability in Chapel Hill comes as the chancellor pushes to build Carolina North, a 230-acre satellite campus along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the site of the old Horace Williams Airport.
The mixed-used project will include academic and research facilities, mixed-use housing for students and local workforce families, and retail, dining and performing arts spaces.
“It’s in our own interest to make sure that folks who work at the university have a place to live somewhere nearby,” Roberts told NC Newsline.
The university will soon put out a Request For Qualifications (RFQ) for a master developer, Roberts said. The initial phase calls for space for 2,220 students and “plenty of housing” for people who work in Chapel Hill.
The groundbreaking is expected in summer 2027.
In recent months, Roberts has linked the need to build Carolina North to the state’s population growth. On Thursday, he noted that North Carolina added 145,000 people in 2025 and is the third fastest-growing state in the country behind Texas and Florida.
The university has announced plans to increase its undergraduate enrollment by 5,000 students over the next 10 years. That’s necessary to keep up with the state’s growth, Roberts said. The university used to enroll 5% of the state’s high school seniors, but the percentage is now 3.5%.
“That number is going to continue to drop every year as the state explodes and we stay relatively flat,” Roberts said. “At some point, we’re not fulfilling our mission, our service to the state, if we don’t try to reflect the explosive growth that we see all around us.”
Roberts was one of three panelists to discuss housing issues during the summit. State Rep. Allen Buansi (D-Orange) and Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International also served on the panel moderated by Leoneda Inge, co-host of WUNC’s “Due South.”
Reckford said the gap between what it costs to create a unit of housing and what a family can afford is the widest in modern history.
Jonathan Reckford (Photo: Habitat for Humanity)The Chapel Hill native and UNC Chapel Hill graduate said the gap is a supply problem with no easy solutions.
“There have been a lot of really important and valuable demand-side initiatives to help low- and moderate-income families on affordability,” Reckford said, “but if we keep helping on the demand side and don’t solve the supply side … you keep driving prices further up.”
The housing crisis, Rockford said, got its start in 2008 during the financial crisis when the nation lost a large number of small builders, reducing its supply capacity.
Shortening the development process and reducing uncertainty and risk could help with the supply problem, Reckford said, but added that skyrocketing insurance and local zoning and ordinances also pose significant obstacles to increasing supply.
“Some of the policies that were passed, 40, 50 years ago don’t make sense for the way families are formed today and the way people are living,” Reckford said. “We need to get rid of minimal lot sizes. We need to get rid of parking minimums, especially where you have access to transit.”
Allen Buansi (Photo: Greg Childress/NC Newsline)Buansi said the state should do more to support Habitat For Humanity and other nonprofits that work to create affordable housing, using the North Carolina Housing Trust Fund to support public/private development partnerships.
The North Carolina Housing Trust Fund is administered by the North Carolina Housing Finance agency. It funds rental construction, homeownership and emergency repairs for low-income residents.
Jennifer Player, president and CEO of Orange Habitat, noted that her organization has built 382 new homes throughout Orange County and has 27 under construction.
To respond to the growing need for housing, she said, Orange Habitat has increased its annual production from 12 houses per year to 20 and has set a goal to build 38 houses per year.
She said the need for affordable housing is growing faster than any one organization can meet.
“In the Chapel Hill/Carrboro market, as of last month, the median home price is now $721,000,” Player said. “It’s easy to understand how so many in the community feel hopeless. The reality is that the goal of owning a home is slipping away for countless neighbors, leaving people discouraged in the face of these staggering prices.”
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