Dare County affordable housing partners still looking for potential sites  

By Mark Jurkowitz | Outer Banks Voice on November 4, 2023

Woda Cooper eyeing former Kelly’s restaurant location in Nags Head

Woda Cooper is looking at the site of the former Kelly’s restaurant. (Google maps)

As Dare County turns to the affordable housing task force in the hopes of creating consensus and advancing efforts to build more affordable housing, its two development partners are continuing to search for viable sites, according to Dare County Manager Bobby Outten.

The creation of the task force was approved at an Oct. 2 Dare County Commissioners meeting, and it came in the wake of failed efforts to build housing developments in Manteo, Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills. It will be comprised of officials from each of the county’s six towns as well as representatives of such organizations as the Outer Banks Restaurant Association, the Outer Banks Hotel/Motel Association and the Outer Banks Home Builders Association.

Dare County Commissioner Chairman Bob Woodard has said the task force will not convene its first meeting until after the Nov. 7 municipal elections, and Outten characterized its mission as broader than just building a few housing projects.

“This task force means collaboratively; we’ve got to find a way to solve this problem in the long term. And it’s not just a Dare County problem…we have to get everybody on board and then come up with common ground and common ways to figure out how to solve what everybody I think has agreed is a problem,” he said.

The effort to build such housing was recently complicated by a special provision dropped into the state budget that restricts municipalities’ ability to regulate affordable housing projects in their communities that would be funded with $35 million the state has awarded the county. Municipal leaders were both surprised and angered by that provision and all six towns have signed onto an Oct. 6 lawsuit challenging that provision. Both Woodard and Outten have declined to comment on that litigation.

In the meantime, Outten said that the county’s development partners, Woda Cooper and Coastal Affordable Housing, “have been looking at sites continuously and as one site gets ruled out by a town, then they look at other sites. Both groups are doing that as we speak with various sites…and then they have to have dialogue with whatever community they’re going to do it in to make sure they can do it.”

Woda Cooper has a pot of $12 million in county funding to work with. The $35 million in state funding at the heart of the controversial budget provision has been earmarked for the Coastal Affordable Housing group.

Asked about how far these efforts to find new potential housing locations have advanced, Outten noted that “I think there have been some conversations” between the developers and some municipal leaders. But he called it “a feeling out process,” that has not reached a “formal” stage.

Outten declined to mention specific sites under consideration, but in an email to the Voice, Woda Cooper Senior Vice President for Development Denis Blackburne said the vacant Nags Head site that once housed Mike Kelly’s Outer Banks Restaurant & Tavern “is a potential site we are considering.” Kelly sold the property to German grocer Lidl in 2017, which never built a store there, and it was subsequently sold again in 2022.

Both Blackburne and Nags Head Town Manager Andy Garman indicated that the two parties have not discussed any location for a new housing proposal.

Asked how long the county will continue to work with Woda Cooper and Coastal Affordable Housing, Outten said the clock is not ticking in a “legal” sense. “As long as we’re making progress and as long as we’re seeing eye to eye on the deal, then we’ll keep working.”

As for how long it might take to finally launch a housing project, the county manager offered that “I’d like to think that within the next year, we have a site selected. Whether you can get it designed, engineered and start breaking ground within a year, I don’t know.”

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