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- Not to be too cute or poetic with a phrase, but it feels like the summer of our discontent.

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

Thank you for supporting this dialogue.

And it does feel like there is a lot of heat and I don't mean just weather wise, but politically, culturally, economically.

And we will unpack some of what this means right now in this summer, or at least right now with four mayors, the mayors of Charlotte, Columbia, Raleigh, and Florence, and that dialogue begins right now.

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(bright music) On this edition of Carolina Business Review, the Carolina's most influential mayors featuring Vi Lyles of Charlotte, Dan Rickenmann of Columbia, Mary-Ann Baldwin of Raleigh, and Teresa Myers Ervin of Florence.

(bright music) - Not to be too poetic or turn a quick phrase, but it feels like the summer of our discontent.

It's not just hot weather, but politically challenging, anxiety around inflation around housing, around jobs.

And we have the CEOs of the major cities and important towns in the Carolinas joining us.

Your honors, welcome back.

We're gonna start with Charlotte mayor, Mayor Lyles, let's start with an easy question.

You got Roe V. Wade decision, you've got gun legislation, you've got anxiety around an economy or possibly a recession.

Is it harder to find consensus and to move forward now?

What's the challenge?

- The challenge is we're coming out of two years of a pandemic where we were isolated and issues became more and more diversion from what we've done as a community, because we hadn't been able to work together.

So for Charlotte, what that means is that we have to really pivot and figure out how to take engagement to the people, making sure that we are open and honest about the conversations that we have to have on these tough issues, crime, safety, a sense of safety more than anything else, housing and needs that people have.

We are seeing a community where all of us as mayors have to think about what happens if there is a mass shooting?

What happens if there's some major emergency?

So I believe that there's more stress in the area, but I also believe that we should have hope that our citizens understand how divisive and difficult things might be, and that they'll work with us to resolve them.

- How do you do it in Columbia, Mayor Rickenmann.

New set of eyes, fresh vision, as you heard, Mayor Lyles just outlined it.

How do you take all of these challenges and bring people together and move forward?

- Well, I'll tell you, there's a renewed sense of energy here in Columbia, people are engaged.

They're sitting at the table working together, 'cause I think the pandemic brought a lot of people together afterwards.

I mean, people were worried about the future.

They're coming together and realizing that neighbor and neighbor need to work together, business community neighborhoods, we can't survive without each other.

And I see that renewed sense, which is great here because we need it.

I mean, we're in an environment that's been uncompetitive over the last decade and so we really have to change.

And I think the small business community and our business community have come together for the first time in several decades to say, hey, we want better for our community.

Yes.

Look, every day we all wake up worried about mass shooting.

I mean, nobody that's in this role can say they don't think about that.

Unfortunately, we had a ball shooting not too long ago and then a shooting right after that in one of our neighborhoods, all involving young people between 18 and 19, and that's our true crisis.

We talk about housing is a crisis, but the 18 to 24 year olds are our biggest crisis and how we gotta relate to them and work with them and involve them and we are trying to involve... We got 60,000 students here in this community.

I got 45,000 military recruits between the ages of 18 and 21 coming through here at the same time.

So we're inundated with young people who wanna be part of the process.

So we're engaging them, which I do think makes a big difference.

- Mayor Baldwin and Mayor Ervin, how do you prioritize these things that we're starting to talk about right now?

What's important?

How do you say, well, but this is job one, this is the one we need to focus on."

- I don't think it's an either or I think it's an and.

So, what we have prioritized several things.

First off, when you look at gun violence, which is what keeps us up at night, a lot of that also relates to poverty.

It relates to the way people have grown up, the opportunities they have or don't have.

So what we have really prioritized is housing.

That's been our number one goal is to create more... Our goal is to create 57 affordable units within the next two years in addition to what we've done.

We passed an 80 million bond.

We've made all these zoning changes and allowed for all different types of housing choices.

And I think if people have a home that is stable I think we can address some of these other issues.

But the reality is this is all very complicated, so we also have invested in a new interceptor program, working with the NAACP and Moms Demand Action.

So we can kind of identify where gun violence is going to occur and then help with prevention efforts.

We also have expanded our acorns unit, which consists of police and social workers.

So working to get people help and assistance along the way.

And the call that Mayor Lyles and I were on yesterday with the governor's office and our Secretary of Public Safety, also dealt with these issues of gun violence.

But one of the things that stood out for me was a public safety announcement program, focused on safe storage of weapons.

We've had 300 reports of guns stolen from cars this year.

And if those guns are stored safely, they're not in the wrong hands.

So we have to start educating people as to what their role and how they can help prevent this.

- Mayor Ervin, I want same question and I know Florence has had a operation Ceasefire live for a couple years.

And I don't wanna be disrespectful about gun violence, but gun violence seems to be at the top of mind now.

And not that it wasn't before, but when we do see these tragedies, they dominate the headlines and it calls for action right away.

Does gun violence crowd out and as Mayor Baldwin said, it's all kinda part and parcel with the other issues in the community, but in Florence and in the PD, how do you approach not just gun violence and public safety, but how does that fit into the priorities about what is important for you to lead on?

- Well, first of all, good morning.

For everyone here in Florence, we look at it as a quality of life issue.

So when we look at it as quality of life, that mean that we have various parts that affects the lives of our citizens.

So above all, we do want everyone to be safe.

So as leadership here in Florence with the Ceasefire, that event was actually started by a community member.

And we have worked with them to partner with them to support that effort.

But not only, when it comes to a Ceasefire, it goes beyond that.

We look at the fact that when you have young people, especially they need leadership and guidance.

So we have the Mayor's Youth Initiative and that's the partnership of various organization plus our school district who has the hands on the post of the life of the young people.

We also look at it as this way, that if you have a young person and if they have some kind of issue or acting out, you usually can look within the home or their environment or among the peers and community to find out what is affecting that young person.

So in order to support the young person, we must also support the family.

And that is where the mayor initiative come in, because we have the family support system, we have the various services that's available for family lives.

But not only that, two, I agree with the mayor when it comes to housing, but we have for several years now had a community development program where we are going into the communities that have been disenfranchised for years.

We're placing new homes there, homes for ownership.

We've found in the past that when a person owned their home, the children actually do better.

So we are fostering home ownership, but not only that, we are starting to meet with various CEOs so that we can have programs that will help foster apprenticeships, mentoring, and also early employment.

There are programs being introduced into our school system to start training young people so if they don't want to go to college, they can go into the healthcare and become EKG technicians, drone lab work.

So we are looking at this as a holistic approach of how can we address quality of lives issues, but only align...

When it comes to our law enforcement, the City of Florence police department has partnered with our sheriff county and other public agencies so that we can not only address crime, but try to prevent them.

We can find out if there's certain things going on other areas so that we can actually arrest the culprits, the criminals.

So we can decrease that repetitive of someone committed a crime, they go to court and then they released again, and then they go to another county.

So for us, it's quality of life.

We're looking at a full picture of how can we address all these issues for our families here in Florence.

- Mayor Lyles, lemme come back to something, and Charlotte doesn't have a lack of resources when it comes to, not just the Mayor's Racial and Equity Initiative, but the whole idea of housing.

And it seems like we are in a... Let's unpack this for a second.

Seems like we're in a different place now, when we talk about affordable housing, not just because of the resources and the budget surpluses, but there seems to be a much broader appeal and an adoption by almost everyone around affordable housing.

Is that the case?

And do you feel like you've got, and this is not just a Charlotte question, but do you feel like you've got more traction around real sustainable affordable housing?

- In Charlotte, we definitely have traction around affordable housing.

In fact, this fall, we are hosting a summit that will engage the community in helping us make another plan.

We've had many innovations in affordable housing from where the city actually built scattered site housing to where we've used the federal funding to build housing.

But now we are at a point that we realize that most of the issue as the Mayor of Florence said, Mayor Ervin said, this is about what goes on in household.

You know that Charlotte was named 50th out of 50 in large cities in upward mobility.

The data has shown and we are using a lot more metrics and data to prove these facts and to get them out so that people can understand them.

But the data has shown that when a child is in a household where at least one person in the family has a job, that child is going to do better in the school system.

So while we know that we have to focus on those people that would ordinarily be in very heavy subsidized housing, we've also got to look at the people that are working, but not working to a level that they can afford to live in our city.

And that's what this summit is about.

How do we continue to serve those that need really heavily subsidized, what we would ordinarily call our voucher program, but how do we create the opportunity for people that are working every day to still live in our city.

We've got 8,000 city employees, and I'm really proud to say that we have a $20 minimum wage for those workers.

And we also have a fund to give down payment assistance so that they can afford to buy a home in the place that they live and work in.

So all of this is about how do we take the next iteration?

How do we take that next step around innovation in public housing?

I believe that we'll focus on the working poor.

The people that every day work in our hospitals by doing job training for adults, encouraging the school system to do more trades training that match the jobs that are out there and available as kids graduate.

So we are working on this.

As now housing is a part of the quality of life around mobility, upward mobility.

Our priorities in Charlotte have always been, affordable housing, good paying jobs, and the ability to move around the city without having to own a car because cars can cost someone out of pocket.

Insurance, licenses, gasoline.

We're trying to build a system that works, that allows for the public access to all three of those things that we define as our quality of life, a place to live, a place to work, and the ability to spend time with your family however you choose to do that without staying on a highway forever.

- Mayor Rickenmann, Mayor Baldwin, how do you unpack this in your town?

- Well, I mean, I think we've identified, we did an affordable task force here and have been very involved at the state level around tax credits.

But the reality is we gotta shift the model a little bit.

And I heard several of the mayors talk about zoning changes.

Making opportunities for us to have smaller, more dense houses, the middle market.

If you haven't studied in your city, the middle market where duplex is quadraplexes, things of the past allowed people to build wealth.

Owning a home is the quickest way to generational wealth and we in Columbia unfortunately have less than 45% of the houses are owned.

And we got 46,000 homes in our city and 27,000 of those are rented.

And those folks are paying more in rent than they could in home ownership but they don't have the opportunity.

So this summer we're taking down 68 houses that were condemned and putting them back out in the market, partnering with development teams to put houses on there and home ownership, graduating people from the public housing that have gone through a savings programs, training programs that they can experience home ownership, showing people that they have an opportunity to have the American dream in our city.

But we also had prohibited vertical growth for so long here where density is a big part of this because it's not just affordable units, it's workforce housing that we need.

Millennials want a whole different aspect.

I think Mayor Lyles said it best, they don't wanna get in their car to go to work.

They don't wanna get in their car to go eat and enjoy and shop.

They wanna be able to have a walkable, livable community.

And the best way to do that is increase home ownership and livability downtown in our communities.

But then we have a senior, I mean, I just saw the statistic that was 85% of all folks in the next, I think it was five to 10 years, 85% of that are gonna be baby boomers that want a smaller footprint, a condo apartment, something smaller than a house to maintain.

Single mothers who no longer have children and millennials make up with no children households, 85% of our housing needs in the future and this is across the State of South Carolina.

So we know the effect it will have here in the capital city.

And so we have to prepare for that.

And we're not set up that because for so long I think we pressured neighborhoods to be single family homes.

And the reality is, is we need to have a variety of options to keep up with this and keep our community here locally in town.

So then the connectivity happens that helps our small businesses, that helps our connectivity.

It brings neighborhood, the fabrics back together where people actually know their neighbors, which is a big part of what we have to do.

So it's multi-phased.

And at the end of the day, we still have to make sure that we have the training opportunities.

I think Mayor Ervin spoke about it earlier.

We're building a, a skilled training center to work with our youth to help them get into apprenticeships.

Businesses now...

There isn't a business in this community that's not trying to hire somebody, but a lot of people don't know how to go do an interview.

They don't know what the steps are.

We also wanna make sure that we have second chance opportunities that we ban the box here for a reason to give people an opportunity.

But at the same time, we gotta deal with all the other aspects that are out there.

We talked about repeat offenders and how we deal with the judicial system because public safety, cleanliness safety are the cornerstones for all economic development and then you gotta throw housing into that mix today.

So if we don't have those three elements, we're not gonna have a strong community.

So we are committed.

We need 6,700 units right now in Columbia, South Carolina, and close to 18,000 over the next decade to keep up with the need.

And so we are focused on that through partnerships, bringing the private development.

You're seeing across the country that housing authorities aren't the developers anymore.

They're partnering with private development to make that happen and then they're becoming the placement agency and I think that's what we gotta focus on.

- Okay, and I don't wanna cut you short.

- [Mayor Ervin] I would like... - We're gonna run outta time.

Please go ahead, were you gonna say something?

- Okay.

Yes, I do wanna add that one of our focus, we hear a lot about affordable housing.

We also look at it from the standpoint of view of having livable wages, because if you make enough, then you can pay for the homes and therefore the homes become affordable.

So we are partnering with our Florence County Economic Development so that we can draw industry in with higher paying jobs, because we need the income so our citizens can afford the homes.

Because if you don't have enough income, you can't afford any home.

- Chris I think that you're-- - [Chris] Go ahead.

(indistinct) - Chris, I think what you're hearing is mayors across the South that are figuring out that we have to have change and we're all progressing in that same way of what we believe is quality of life because quality of life will bring around to really strong economic development.

And we should look at this as a regional thing.

This is not about Charlotte or Raleigh or Columbia or Florence.

It is about how do we make sure that our region has the same values and the same opportunities for the people that live in this space that we call the Carolinas?

- And Chris, I wanna add to what the mayor said, Mayor Lyles said, because it's very important.

The pandemic changed people's outlook, how they work, how they live and the reality is the Southeast is where people wanna come, they want a better quality of life and they're coming in droves and we've gotta be prepared for that.

We can take advantage of this.

And I think Mayor Lyles said it, this is a regional all the way from Texas to Virginia, to Florida, we all need to work collectively together because this is where the growth is in the US.

And I think it's like 6.8% now in the Southeast, I think Raleigh, you've seen double digit growth.

I know Charlotte has, Florence and I are trying to catch up and we're coming after y'all in the growth, but it's about quality of life.

And I think that that is the true underlining defining moment of where people are making decisions on where they're gonna live and where they're gonna invest.

- Mayor Baldwin.

Thank you, Mayor Rickenmann, but Mayor Baldwin just quickly, one last thing on this thing, given how you've all described and been passionate about housing and affordable housing, what if the economy slows down?

What if we look back and say, you know what, we're in a recession right now and we've got another recession or we've got another quarter of this recession.

So mayor Baldwin, does this kind of derail the idea that housing is gonna kinda come off the rails or is immigration just gonna bail us out of any issues?

- Well, first off I think our economy, even in the great recession was pretty resilient because we don't depend on one sector.

We have a tech sector, we have government, we have like education, but we also have pharma and life sciences, et cetera, et cetera, so it's well balanced.

The fact is, I think it was mentioned earlier.

We have Apple, Google, Meta, all coming to this area.

The growth is not gonna slow down.

So we have to stay focused on what we can do.

And I think housing is the most important thing.

I like to talk about housing in this way too.

I like to talk about housing affordability and housing choice because not everybody wants to live in a 3,500 square foot home.

Some people want to live in a cottage court with 1200 square feet that is perfect for them.

And if they can own that, they're still on a path to home ownership.

So that's what we've really tried to do is offer choices to people and create that.

And I think that that is going to be key to the future recession or no recession.

Like I said, it's all about choice.

- Mayor Ervin, we're running out time, we've about three minutes left, but I do wanna unpack this idea, especially in the PD, in the Florence region.

What happens if we have a recession?

Same question we just had for Mary-Ann Baldwin.

What happens if there's a slowdown and you have initiatives around housing and you're feeling pretty good about the graduation rate or the involvement of young people, do you think a recession can upend all of that for your area?

- Probably one of the part of planning for a recession is that you plan every day that anything could possibly happen.

So for us, we're still focused on the quality of life, we're having that balance.

We wanna be sure that we have the industry here that will support the quality of life that we do have.

We're working with programs, even with a city that we have down payment assistance, for anyone who qualifies who wants a home.

We are partnering with other industries.

So for us, in order to avoid the effects of a recession, our answer is partnership, working together and planning ahead of time.

So if the industry slows down in one area, we are stable in other areas that will prevent that major effect that would occur from a recession.

So no, for it's planning and partnership.

- Mayor Lyles, we started with you, looks like we're gonna end with you, we literally have a minute left.

Same question, are you, not to be dismissive and not to say that that this doesn't mean anything, but are you worried about a recession?

What would happen to the Charlotte region in a recession?

- Well, I think it may slow down some of the major investments that we would plan.

You know, that we would love to be able to increase our rail system and our bus system to a level of excellence that you see in the East Coast, Northern East Coast towns.

So that may slow us down a little bit and I understand that.

Because what we want to do is maintain the priorities that are first and foremost for the community and that is housing choice.

Thank you, Maryanne, as well as affordability.

So we have some things that we've committed to do recession impact or not.

And that's one of the things around good planning and good ideas around how we do financing that we also plan for these ups and downs in the economy, because most of our improvements that we invest in have a lifetime of legacy of being able to be affordable under, I think one of the lowest tax rates, I think with the second lowest tax rate in the State of North Carolina.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And that's what keeps us strong.

We continue to look at what we have to do right financially, but also focus on the highest priorities and that's housing and focusing on getting these good paying jobs.

I think that we will have less of an impact than some of the states across the nation.

- Thank you ma'am.

Thank you all for joining us.

Until next week, I'm Chris William.

Goodnight.

- [Announcer] Major funding for Carolina Business Review provided by High Point University, Martin Marietta, Colonial Life, The Duke Endowment, Sonoco, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

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