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- Well, happy holidays.

We are back in full color with a full compliment of guests and back in the studio for now, for sure.

In a moment, we will unpack the issues that affect our Carolina communities.

I'm Chris William, and welcome again to the most widely watched and longest running program on Carolina business, policy, public affairs seen each and every week across the Carolinas for more than 30 years.

Thank you for supporting it.

In a moment, the Chancellor of the Urban University in the Carolina's largest city, UNC Charlotte's, Dr. Sharon Gaber.

And we start right now.

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The Duke Endowment, a private foundation enriching communities in the Carolina's through higher education, healthcare, rural churches and children's services.

On this edition of Carolina Business Review, Aaron Nelson of the Chapel Hill Carboro Chamber of Commerce.

Tom Keith, retired CEO of Sisters of Charity Foundation.

And special guest, Dr. Sharon Gaber, Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

(dynamic music) - Welcome to our program.

You guys feel safe enough to be back in the studio?

Close?

- It's really good to be.

- Feel great.

- Yeah.

Good to see you.

- You too.

- Tom, welcome.

Thanks for-- You made a last minute change in your schedule to do that.

Aaron, always nice to have you back.

Gentlemen.

It's hard to imagine that this is not Goldilocks scenario.

When you look at economic development wins in South Carolina, in North Carolina, they're pretty big.

BMW's, almost $2 billion announcement.

Volvo, NewCo.

Wolf speed, Microsoft, Apple, take your pick.

I mean, these are big numbers.

With the wind at our back, the dark side of that, Aaron, I'm gonna start with you, is housing.

It is gentrifying neighborhoods.

It is pushing people out of not just legacy family homes, but is this more-- This seems to have pretty long and deep ramifications.

- The impacts are gonna be substantial, right?

When we do economic development, we market, we say come here and then they've picked us and now we're gonna have to work on the infrastructure to have 'em.

Housing prices are going through the roof.

We're seeing in Chatham County and Orange County, North Carolina, as much as 20% pickups.

Now $600,000 is the average cost of a home in generally, rural Chatham County.

But there are strategies to add more affordable housing.

But it's gonna have to be a priority, not just for traditional advocates of affordable housing, but for the economic development community public policy makers.

It's gonna have to be a top priority.

- Tom, I don't wanna be hyperbolic about this, but this really is an issue.

Are you seeing it?

And, I'm not stating that, I'm asking you, is this really an issue that is that broad based that is concerning to you?

- I think it is.

I'm particularly interested in our low income communities and you know, you think about jobs and manufacturing growth and expansion as progress, and we want that.

But, the fallout from that can really be hurtful to particularly low income families and neighborhoods.

It affects, you know, their ability to go to work, to go to school in the same location.

They're often displaced into areas that may not be on the bus line.

And it's just, you know, there are many good things about economic development growth but there are also some downsides we gotta be mindful of.

- So, so what are the fixes?

What do we do?

How do we fix it?

I mean really Aaron, how do we fix it?

- I mean, I think there's some real strategies to do it.

And I think employers can play a role, and haven't traditionally.

So, there's some traditional stuff.

There's federally supported housing.

You can make the land free, you can make the development process easier.

But, you can also do subsidy.

There's some organizations that are doing down payment assistance.

We're gonna give you $10,000 down payment on your house, but we'll forgive it over the next three or four years to help you get in.

Or we might do direct subsidy or master leasing.

What if a major employer, they're gonna lease a bunch of units in a community but then they're gonna buy down the rate or subsidize them in order to make them more affordable to their community.

So, first I think we're gonna need more supply.

We're gonna have to have dramatically more units.

But, comprehensive strategies to keep those prices affordable to the working folk in our communities.

- So maybe this is a question for Chris Chung at EDPNC in North Carolina, but would that-- Would've that been part of the package?

Or maybe, you know, when they win Apple in North Carolina, would that have been one of the negotiating points that you need to also help us subsidize housing for?

- I would be surprised.

I am not aware of that being part of it.

But I think in the future it will be, we'll talk about how to improve the roads to the place, the utilities to the place.

But, we're gonna need to make sure that we have the housing infrastructure as well.

We've assumed that the market will take care of it.

And the market will.

We're gonna bring-- A whole lot of units are gonna get built.

But I think we have to focus to make sure that they are affordable to the folks living in our community.

And that's gonna be, I think, through comprehensive solutions that are both gonna be from policy makers and local government.

I think the state has a role.

But also the private sector can play there too.

- Tom, is there a scalable deployable idea that can be answer this issue?

- I, I don't know.

I think every community's different.

And so, we may go to Charleston and see one set of circumstances.

We may go to another community with a different set of circumstances.

But, to Aaron's point, I think we need buy-in from all sectors.

We need government to play a role.

We need community business leaders to play a role.

We need nonprofits to play a role.

Any kind of change that's going to occur.

Because it's gonna be-- I'll tell you, supply and demand is extraordinarily out of balance.

In Columbia, for example, for every one affordable housing home unit that opens up, there are probably 1500 people in line to get that one unit.

So, we just can't move fast enough.

- And it's super expensive to make a unit affordable.

It can cost between 75,000 and a hundred thousand to make one permanently affordable unit with subsidy.

But I think we should explore, like we've used TIF, tax increment financing.

- Right.

- That's where you take future tax revenue and you use it to invest in infrastructure.

We've used that to pave roads and we've used that for a host of things.

We have never thought about, what if we use TIF to make housing affordable?

What if we took-- We have an apartment complex in our community that's assessed at a hundred million dollars.

So, it's generating a hun-- A million dollars a year in property tax.

What if we pledged half of that back into buying down the rate in some of the units?

- Well, in a place like Orange County, I would guess Chapel Hill Carboro, that would be an easy argument to win.

- Well, people are interested in it.

Some places progressive, like my commuter also anti-growth and anti, you know, - Right, right.

- adding new people has, you know, there's been some resistance in some communities to population growth, worried about school impacts and other things.

But, I think we're now getting over that.

- Yeah.

- When we realize that people gonna have to commute from so far away.

We're gonna have to bring the housing closer to the employment.

- We've got about two minutes left, Tom.

And, inflation, not surprising.

Inflation is, has been a real bugaboo for a while and it looks like it's slowing down the rate of acceleration of inflation.

But that doesn't mean inflation's gone away.

That high prices are persisting.

Tom, do you get a sense, and when you were running Sisters of Charity Foundation and you all were making grants to help communities in Midlands, in the low country, in South Carolina.

Was this issue of inflation?

Was that front and center for folks?

Or do you see how we might remediate this issue of persistently higher prices?

- It's a problem.

I think it became exacerbated by Covid.

I think we saw, you know, the band-aid ripped off the wound during Covid and families were struggling with schools closed.

You had kids that weren't getting their meals, you know, through the school and, and we had to deploy a lot of people out to help them, those families receive the food that they needed.

So, I think it was exposed during Covid.

Inflation doesn't help things.

I don't know... You know, everybody has to pay a price at the gas pumps.

- Yeah.

- You know, it doesn't matter if you make 500,000 a year, or $10,000 a year.

And so, inflation I think has a greater impact on our lower income people day in and day out.

And, they gotta make choices.

You know, do I pay for gas?

Do I pay my electric bill?

Do I pay my rental costs?

Do I pay the medical bills?

You know, it's not a, and - And that has a long tail on it.

That's not going away in a year or - No, no.

That's why you our eviction rates are going up and other things that really you know, force a family into tough decisions.

- Okay.

Okay gentlemen, thank you.

Stay with us.

Coming up, we like to do this at the end of every year and the beginning of the next year.

And that is two separate programs with our on staff economists.

And they all get along amazingly.

Well brilliantly, actually, and we're gonna take a look at back at 2021 and look forward at 2000, I'm sorry, 2022 and look forward 2023.

It's not a two part, but they're two separate shows and we do that every year, and we hope you'll tune in for that.

It is one of the 17 schools within this nation's oldest public university system.

And it is also one of the largest and fastest growing.

Joining us now is the fifth and the first female chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Sharon Gaber.

Dr. Gaber, welcome to the program.

- Thank you.

- And a couple years later, congratulations on the job.

- Thank you very much.

- We're all emerging from our shells here, but, Dr. Gaber, one of the things in the strategic plan of UNC Charlotte that you clearly had leadership on was this idea of becoming a research university.

The Carnegie Class Classification are one of course.

Why is that so important?

Why are you chasing that down?

- Well, I think it's a great question.

So, when we started putting together our new strategic plan called, Shaping What's Next, we said, okay, what is important to our community?

And I spent time in my first year meeting with community leaders going around and saying, how does this university help fuel what you're doing?

And part of what they said is, research is important.

It provides the talent that we need.

It helps think about innovation, it helps think about spinoff opportunities.

It helps bring in federal dollars that have a multiplier effect in our community.

So for all of those reasons, and you think about University of South Carolina and Columbia.

You think about Chapel Hill and State and Ral-- - Which are R1 schools?

- Correct.

There are businesses that have a strong desire to locate near those research universities.

And we recognize as the public Urban research university in this metro area, we ought to be stepping up and doing more.

And so, what we've said in our strategic plan is we're in R2 currently.

But, what we've said is we are going to continue and make progress.

And the campus has said this is important and really what we wanna do to help fuel the broader region.

- So, and this is my term ma'am but this would be kind of the varsity squad of research universities in the country that you would be entering into?

- Is that fair to, - Right.

Right.

And and I'd say, you know, some some universities make a concerted push and some universities just continue to make progress and happen upon it.

And we are sort of teetering in both worlds.

We are not going to have a large new infusion of resources that says, Hey, we're gonna give you a chunk of money, go do this.

We're working together and saying, this is important for our region.

Let's make progress and let's do what we ought to be doing and stepping up to help our region by being an even stronger research university.

- Do you have the support of the system?

Do you feel like the state is going to back you on this?

- Well I believe, and you know, President Hans and I have discussed it.

What I believe is the system recognizes the importance of the research universities.

I think there will always be a question about how the funding models work.

I know that a couple other of the campuses in the system have said they have a strong desire to become top tier research also.

And so, it's going to be a conversation amongst the system as we do this.

I would say that for the state though I think there's a very positive economic benefit from economic development perspective.

And I'd point to the state of Texas that actually said, this is important and we want to invest in these universities to become R1.

They would get additional resources.

I'm not expecting that.

There has not been a conversation that we're going to get extra money to do it.

But what we've said is we recognize the importance of it and then the benefits will come along with it.

- Okay.

I think if you're gonna ask a question sir, then you need to disclose the fact that if you've got a bias toward Chapel Hill.

- I'm from Chapel Hill.

It was nice to take the train to Charlotte, and as a home of a research university, that's super exciting to hear you talk about.

- Thank you.

- The impacts across the region grow and grow as you get more into research.

What we're hearing from local employers is recruiting retaining employees is one of the hardest things.

In order for you to be a great research university you gotta hold onto your faculty and recruit others.

What are some of the key challenges to doing that?

Or maybe being in Charlotte makes it easy, but, is it a challenge for you all also?

- It is a challenge for us, and I think we are appreciative obviously to the legislature and to the system for enabling us to have raises and enabling us to have labor market adjustment funding and this sort of thing.

But we are in this large urban environment that says, hey we can hire your employees often for a higher salary because we are set across the state.

So, the variations that take into account that this is a large metro area, don't really play there.

So, we have challenges.

What I'd say is we have worked to recognize, for example, not every staff member has to work in their office every day.

We have to be flexible and we have to work with our faculty and our staff and recognize the pandemic has changed the world.

And that-- You know, and I think some of us, some of us weren't ready to recognize that and really in the past year have come around saying, if we wanna keep our talent, we have to be flexible, we have to be appreciative we have to recognize that we're doing things in a different way than we were before.

Now there are some units, especially at a university, you have to be there in person.

And we've said that, that there are some, but it might not mean you have to be there five days or six days or whatever it is.

So, we are trying to work through that flexibility and make sure that our teams feel valued.

Because I do think we've spent a lot of time talking about appreciate and value and recognizing the stress that everybody's been through - Mhm.

Tom.

- Covid's had a huge impact on higher education.

And was wondering about student mental health.

You know, you think about depression and isolation.

- Right.

- And anxiety and even suicide.

How do you address that from your institution in terms of warning signs, your faculty, other students?

How can they become more aware to impact this on the front end?

- Yeah, thank you.

So, I mean, a couple things that you've said.

We have a center for counseling care.

And then we created a new center for integrated care.

There are some students who aren't going to sign up for an appointment to go get counseling.

But, we've put together a location so that we can identify students who might have needs a faculty member might say, they're not showing up, they seem disengaged, and we've got a group now working holistically to try to reconnect them.

So, we have expanded what we're doing.

And we also have a team that takes information online from faculty staff and other students saying, I have a concern.

And we have individuals who are on campus that follow up with sort of a care and concern contact to say, Hey, you doing okay?

Why don't we talk?

Or let's check in and see what's going on.

So, we have had to ramp that up really significantly.

- Chancellor, the um-- You can't talk about college without talking about tuition.

I know that's not a surprise to you.

You've had six years of frozen tuition now, which is good for those that have to pay it, but tuition at best.

And of course ma'am, this is my point of view.

It seems like the finance of higher ed is so arcane to figure it out with with grants and loans, and tuition and not full retail and retail and in-state and out-of-state.

Does there need to be a simpler form of attending college for folks to understand when they figure out what college they want to go to?

Does that arcane nature make it harder for for people to pick colleges?

- Well, I'd say yes and no.

I think in North Carolina, we have the good fortune that the UNC system is very affordable.

And so you mentioned six years of no tuition increase for undergraduate in-state students.

There will be a seventh year of no in-state tuition increase.

You know, almost what you're suggesting is a federalization of the way that this is done.

I think that would be very difficult to think about.

I do know for our campus, we are considered a best value, and I think we're the third in the state in terms of what the outcome is, associated with what the cost is.

I recognize people talk about tuition as really hard to manage, but for just over $7,000 a year tuition and fees, that is a pretty darn affordable degree worth that investment.

So, I would say that absent some policy that we're going to standardize it, which isn't going to happen.

- Yeah.

- We are very fortunate that the legislature sees the need to invest heavily in higher education, I think.

- Aaron.

- Well I agree.

And I agree with that.

In North Carolina, I haven't recently been through this process.

I have a freshman in a UNC system school in Chapel Hill.

North Carolina's process was easy to apply to.

We skipped some states.

He skipped applying to some states, cause they made it so hard.

- Right.

- Cause it was hard to figure out.

Our schools generally cost about-- - We've got about three minutes left so.

- Right.

So, my question to you is, do you want more-- Do you think you need more revenue?

If we're gonna hold tuition down, where else does the money come from, if you're gonna grow?

- Well, so I think there's not a chancellor that ever's going to say I need less or I'm fine where I am.

But, I think we are doing well and the system has implemented some new measures associated with performance funding that gives us an opportunity to actually help get some additional revenue.

So, I think there are ideas in place that we're working through.

I think as we work on the research we talked about, grant money coming in, that's another opportunity for hiring students, hiring grad assistants, additional resources for faculty members.

So, I think there are places, but I would never say we need less.

- Just a quick, just a quick follow up on that.

Sorry, Tom.

Would getting R1 status, would that mean a meaningful bump in total revenue for the school?

- It generally does.

I mean, I think again, there are details to be worked out.

But yes, I think that would have a positive impact.

- Okay.

All right.

Tom.

- Yeah.

The um, more-- Wanted to ask you about online learning - Yes.

- because that's more attractive now than ever.

Students wanting that.

What does it take in terms of infrastructure technology to get up to speed to meet the demand for high online learning today?

- Well, and it's interesting because obviously during Covid, everybody had to pivot.

Everybody ramped up with that.

And we really did invest heavily in that.

Within the past year we have opened a school of professional studies which is really geared toward working adults who might want to complete a degree online.

And so what we realized is we were all doing it during this time period.

Now, let's let people know here is the location and an opportunity for somebody who might not want to go and be on campus, but in fact wants the education.

We've got the location, and we've got the talented group now that have figured out how to do this in a meaningful way.

- We have about two minutes left.

There is a college president in Columbia, Dr. Roslyn Artis at Benedict College and she was on the program recently.

I asked her about student loan forgiveness and she said, "I look at it as a rebate."

And for an HBCU, she explained it that it's a rebate because the Pell Grant didn't go far enough long enough for that.

In literally in just a couple minutes.

How do you look at student loan forgiveness?

Is it going in the right direction?

Is it a good tool that we have?

- Well, sort of like my earlier comment about I would never say that I didn't wanna think about more resources.

This is an opportunity for our students.

So, I don't know, obviously, what will happen ultimately with it, but every university president or chancellor wants to think about how do we reduce debt for students.

So, from that perspective, it obviously is a great opportunity.

One of the things that we're working on is continuously thinking about how do we reduce student debt at graduation?

So, this would help us in that way.

I want our students to come in, complete their education in four years, be able to leave and have as little debt as possible.

And if there is an opportunity to forgive debt, that would be wonderful.

Right.

- Yeah.

In a minute, Will Healy was a well liked football coach.

Long term win-loss record.

You know, it comes down to that.

- Mmhm.

- But, I would say the buzz goes way beyond Charlotte about who you've hired.

Even Nick Saban weighed in on this one.

It's pretty amazing.

You literally got about a minute, Chancellor.

Why is this new hire so exciting for you all?

- We're excited.

Our new head coach is Biff Poggi.

He is the associate head coach at the University of Michigan.

Last I checked, I think they're 11 and 0.

So, we are tracking that carefully.

And, he's had a long interesting career and history and, you know, HBO Max documentary about his high school coaching.

He comes with a lot of energy, and a great network and set of connections.

And I have heard, there is a buzz in the region about this.

As we move into the American Athletic Conference, which will continuously ratchet up the strength of our competition.

Having him come in, who has helped coach at highest level.

We're excited about it, and I think it'll bring in some real talent.

- Dr. Gaber, thank you for joining us.

Best of luck.

We're gonna be watching the football program, especially.

A lot of people will be.

But I know you're excited.

Thank you for taking the time.

- Thank you very much.

- Nice to see you.

Tom, welcome.

Thanks for making a last minute change.

- Thank you.

- And joining us.

Always nice to see you, Chris.

- A pleasure.

Good to see you.

Chancellor, very nice to meet you.

Thank you.

- Happy Holidays.

Good luck and thank you for watching our program.

Goodnight.

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