Cary Council Effectively Rejects Amberwood Housing Deal After Heated Hearing
“We moved into affordable housing in Durham. And I’m telling you, it saved our marriage. It saved our life.”
Carla Liberatore, a Cary resident living in Lochmere, was one of the relatively few speakers who urged the Cary Town Council to allow the Raleigh Housing Authority to purchase Amberwood at Lochmere last night.
During the public hearing, Liberatore recounted the financial crisis that led her family to temporarily live in affordable housing.
She and her husband both lost their jobs during a recession in upstate New York. With a one-year-old and a five-year-old, the family drove from Syracuse to North Carolina after her husband found a new job.
Within a month, however, his new employer told him the company could no longer afford to pay him.
“We had babies to feed, and I wasn’t working,” Liberatore said.
The family moved into affordable housing in Durham. Liberatore credited it with giving them the stability they needed to rebuild their lives.
“I became a successful financial adviser. We raised our family. We live in Lochmere now,” she said.
Other speakers viewed the proposal very differently.
“Rape, intentional homicide, sexual assault of a child at gunpoint, in the daytime, near the street, not by a family member,” said Dr. Elena Morgan, describing crimes she said she found near other RHA-owned properties. “Street crime that Cary cannot comprehend.”
“Please do not put this in my neighborhood and let my disabled brother risk his life on the street,” said Joshua Atkins, who lives with his family about half a mile from Amberwood.
Atkins said he feared Lochmere would become a “crime-driven neighborhood” if the resolution passed.
Another speaker described growing up near housing managed by a different housing authority, recounting a stabbing, rats, piles of trash, and riot police using tear gas. He said he did not want those conditions brought into Cary.
The comments repeatedly described the proposal as bringing new affordable housing into Lochmere.
Amberwood, however, is not a proposed development. It already exists.
The 340-unit apartment community has been part of Lochmere since the 1990s. It is 96% occupied and home to approximately 314 Cary households. Its average rent is currently affordable to households earning about 52% of the area median income.
The proposal would have preserved that affordability for at least 30 years while placing income limits on future tenants as apartments became available.
After audience members interrupted Liberatore as she explained that she had never personally witnessed crime problems around Amberwood, she responded bluntly.
“We’re an anger, fear-based society, and it’s all in this room.”
The hearing supplied plenty of evidence for her assessment.
This was the first Cary Town Council meeting since the release of the State Auditor’s report on town spending. Earlier that same evening, an outside law firm presented its own investigation into financial oversight, reporting failures, and Cary’s workplace culture.
By the time Council reached the Amberwood hearing, the room was already beyond tense with voices frustrated about Cary’s leadership.
Over the next two hours, that frustration grew into open hostility. Speakers and council members were interrupted. Supporters of the resolution were heckled. Council member Michelle Craig was booed while explaining her position. Mayor Harold Weinbrecht repeatedly asked the audience to stop speaking from their seats and allow the meeting to continue. One speaker refused to leave the podium after going over her allocated time for over two minutes.
The town received 144 written comments before the hearing, and approximately 20 people spoke in person.
What RHA wanted to do
Amberwood is currently considered naturally occurring affordable housing. It is privately owned, receives no government subsidy and has no legal restrictions requiring its rents to remain affordable.
Town staff said the average monthly rent is approximately $1,510, which is considered affordable to a household earning about 52% of the Cary area median income.
The property is now for sale.
According to Cary staff, Amberwood is being marketed to potential buyers as having between $200 and $300 per month in “rent headroom.” In other words, a new private owner could potentially raise rents by that amount while remaining competitive with comparable apartments.
The Raleigh Housing Authority submitted the winning offer for the property after competing against private real estate investors.
RHA proposed keeping all 340 apartments affordable to households earning no more than 80% of area median income for at least 30 years. At least 51% of the units would have been reserved for households earning no more than 60% of area median income.
A maximum of 34 apartments could have received project-based voucher assistance.
RHA representatives said they intended to keep the current residents, leases, and property management company in place. They also committed to minimizing rent increases to avoid displacement and renovating apartments as they naturally became vacant.
RHA CEO Ashley Lommers-Johnson said the goal was to keep Amberwood largely as it is today.
“The rents will stay the same. The lease will stay the same. The management company will stay the same. The feel of living there will stay the same,” she told Council.
RHA already assists 211 Cary households through its Section 8 voucher program and has more than 400 Cary residents on its waiting lists. Those households currently rent from private landlords throughout the town.
What Council was actually deciding
The vote was not over a rezoning or a proposal to build new apartments.
North Carolina law requires a housing authority created in one municipality to obtain authorization before operating inside an adjoining municipality.
RHA is a separate public authority. It is not a department of the City of Raleigh, although its nine commissioners are appointed by Raleigh’s mayor.
Cary would not have become a partner in the purchase or financing. The property would also have remained subject to Cary’s zoning rules and town ordinances.
The resolution would have allowed RHA to operate as a housing authority at Amberwood. It also would have allowed the property to receive a tax exemption available under state housing authority law.
Town staff calculated Amberwood’s current Cary municipal property tax bill at approximately $236,984 per year.
That lost revenue became one of the primary objections raised by opponents.
Some supporters viewed it differently.
Craig described the exemption as an affordable housing investment. Instead of collecting the money and later spending it on a smaller affordable housing project, she argued, Cary would be using the exemption to preserve 340 existing apartments.
Weinbrecht said that if the resolution passed, he wanted the forgone revenue counted toward the portion of Cary’s property tax rate that Council already dedicates to affordable housing.
Where the purchase money came from
Several council members also questioned whether Raleigh taxpayers were funding RHA’s purchase.
RHA had placed $2 million in refundable earnest money toward the acquisition.
Jason Morrow, RHA’s director of acquisitions and strategic partnerships, said the money came from the authority’s unrestricted reserves. Those reserves were generated through income from unsubsidized workforce housing and fees RHA earns from issuing bonds for tax-credit developments in Wake County.
Council members repeatedly asked whether City of Raleigh tax dollars had been mixed into the money being used for Amberwood.
Morrow said no.
“There’s no Raleigh tax money that is going into this,” he said. “Not at all.”
The covenant question
One of the most significant unanswered questions involved Lochmere’s architectural and landscaping covenants.
Several residents said those covenants are why Amberwood remains in good condition more than three decades after it was built.
One speaker argued that the covenants would become difficult to enforce if a governmental entity owned the property. The speaker said a homeowners association might be unable to place a judgment lien on property owned by a housing authority, potentially removing one of the association’s primary enforcement tools.
That question was not resolved during the hearing.
Morrow said he had not discussed the specific legal issue in depth with RHA’s attorneys, but saw no reason the property would not remain subject to the covenants.
Cary Town Attorney Lisa Glover offered a similar preliminary answer. She said a buyer generally acquires property subject to existing covenants, but RHA would need to confirm the details with its own legal counsel.
Mayor Pro Tem Lori Bush later cited the unresolved covenant issue as one reason she could not support the proposal.
A process compressed into weeks
Another consistent concern among the council majority was not necessarily the goal of preserving Amberwood. It was how quickly Council was being asked to make the decision.
RHA signed an access agreement around June 12, beginning a 30-day due diligence period followed by a 15-day extension.
The authority faced a July 27 deadline to decide whether to continue with the purchase. After that point, additional money would have been placed at risk.
Cary published its legal notice July 10. Council received its staff report July 13. The public hearing was held July 23.
The Lochmere Association said it did not receive direct notification and learned about the proposal through residents. Town officials said Cary had followed the public notice requirements established by state law.
Weinbrecht said his primary objection was the compressed process.
“If I am making a decision and I can’t give the public enough information where they understand all the details of it, then I shouldn’t be defending that decision,” he said.
He acknowledged that Cary might be missing a valuable opportunity but said RHA needed to involve the public earlier.
Bush said she still had questions about RHA’s governance, Cary’s lack of representation on its board, and how the relationship would work over the next 30 years.
“I am an affordable housing advocate,” Bush said. “I believe the folks that live in Amberwood should be able to stay in Amberwood, and I want this to happen, but I don’t have enough information to support it at this time.”
Council member Bella Huang, whose district includes Amberwood, also said she did not have enough information to support the resolution.
Several council members suggested that Cary should explore creating its own housing authority or participating in a regional authority with Wake County and other municipalities.
The two opposing votes
Craig and Council member Brittany Richards cast the two votes against tabling the resolution.
Craig said she was disappointed by comments associating people who receive housing assistance with drugs and crime.
As a teacher, Craig said she had taught children who lived in subsidized housing, including children from McDougald Terrace in Durham, which multiple speakers cited as a warning.
“These are humans that deserve respect,” Craig said. “We can address them on an individual basis instead of making sweeping statements.”
She was booed while explaining she would vote to move forward.
“I respect your opinion even when you boo me,” she responded.
Richards said she had met with RHA, spoken with a Raleigh City Council member, and consulted Cary Police Chief Terry Sult about crime statistics before reaching her decision.
She emphasized that Amberwood’s current owner is selling the property regardless of what Cary Council decided.
The choice was not between RHA ownership and keeping everything permanently as it is. The property will have a new owner, and that owner could be a private investment company with no obligation to preserve its current rents.
Richards said she believed RHA ownership was the outcome most likely to keep Amberwood’s existing residents and character intact.
“In this case, we do have an opportunity to preserve a community,” she said.
The final vote
Huang moved to table the resolution.
Glover clarified that tabling would leave the proposal technically open, meaning Council could reconsider it later. However, because RHA needed a decision before its July 27 contract deadline, everyone involved acknowledged that tabling would function as a rejection of the current acquisition.
The motion passed 5-2.
Craig and Richards voted against tabling. Weinbrecht, Huang, Bush and the remaining council members voted in favor.
What happens now
Amberwood remains for sale.
Its current affordability is the result of its existing rents, not a legal restriction. There is no requirement that its next owner keep those rents where they are, retain existing tenants, or avoid taking advantage of the advertised $200 to $300 in monthly rent headroom.
Council’s decision ended the immediate RHA proposal but did not resolve the problem that brought it forward.
Cary still has a 340-unit apartment community serving hundreds of local households that is about to change ownership.
For much of Thursday’s hearing, however, the residents of Amberwood were discussed less as neighbors who could be displaced and more as an abstract threat that might arrive later.
Liberatore’s story offered a very different picture.
Thirty-three years ago, her family needed affordable housing. It gave them enough stability to recover, build careers, and raise their children.
Today, she owns a home in the same Lochmere community where some residents warned that people receiving housing assistance would bring violence, drugs and disorder.
“These people deserve a second chance,” Liberatore told Council. “I know I did.”