The Middle Class Housing Plan

North Carolina has a housing crisis. Across the state — in cities and rural communities, for renters and buyers, for young families and retirees — housing costs are rising faster than incomes. The biggest driver of the state’s increasing cost of living isn’t healthcare or groceries. It’s housing. And the reason is simple: there is not enough of it.

The Middle Class Housing Plan is based on a straightforward premise. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. The solution is to make it financially viable to build more market-rate housing — and then remove the regulatory barriers that prevent that from happening.

Key Findings

Housing is the primary driver of rising costs for middle-class North Carolinians. Renters and buyers alike face the same fundamental problem: too little inventory and too much demand. That imbalance pushes prices up across the market, not just at the top.

The problem is policy, not market failure. Restrictive zoning, permitting delays, and regulatory barriers make it difficult or impossible to build the housing that middle-class families need. These aren’t accidents — they are the predictable consequences of land-use rules that protect existing homeowners at the expense of everyone else.

Market-rate housing benefits everyone. When more housing is built at market rate, it reduces pressure on the entire market — including affordable and workforce housing. Building only at the top of the market is not the goal; building enough that prices stabilize is.

The solution is to legalize housing. Allowing more housing types — duplexes, townhomes, small apartment buildings — in more places, combined with streamlined permitting and reduced carrying costs for developers, creates the conditions for the market to deliver more homes faster.

What North Carolina Should Do

• Reform zoning laws to legalize missing-middle housing statewide
• Streamline permitting with binding timelines to reduce carrying costs and delays
• Remove regulatory barriers that add cost without improving quality or safety
• Create a viable business model for market-rate construction — then get out of the way