Dare County Housing Task Force to create housing nonprofit

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on July 13, 2025

Dare County Housing Task Force at its December 2024 meeting, (File photo, credit: Kari Pugh)

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice

After more than a year and a half of discussion and meetings, the Dare County Housing Task Force is transitioning to a housing nonprofit.

“It is my goal to have the paperwork filed by the end of the year. So we are actively working on that,” Task Force Chair Donna Creef told the Voice. The task force is an advisory committee—something Creef acknowledged is “a paper tiger.”

“It doesn’t have its own existence,” she added, describing the limits of the task force. “Whereas the nonprofit is something that you can reach out and touch.” A housing nonprofit, Creef stressed will be able to “get grant funding from a public agency or a private corporation or some other nonprofit.”

The creation of the Task Force was announced in late 2003, and it was envisioned as a different approach to generating housing after proposals from the county’s initial housing partners were rejected by several Dare communities. At that time, the state legislature had earmarked $35 million for affordable housing in the county, but it included provisions that would have effectively stripped local jurisdictions of their code enforcement oversight. The $35 million was returned to the state in May 2024.

In its 2024 Dare Community Housing Task Force Report, the group indicated it was seriously considering establishing a nonprofit housing organization. And during a February 2025 presentation of that report to the Dare County Commissioners, the challenging issue of generating community support for additional housing was a major topic, with Creef noting that a key to future success is “the community recognizing the need [for housing] as a whole.”

The Task Force nonprofit concept will not be the first time a housing nonprofit has been tried on the Outer Banks. About a quarter century ago, according to former Nags Head Mayor Bob Muller, the Outer Banks Community Development Corporation (CDC) was created “after the Chamber of Commerce held a large and major community gathering about housing.”

Muller, who served at one time as president of the Outer Banks CDC, said in an interview that “It had very limited success. It assisted in getting some affordable units built in Kill Devil Hills and in Frisco, [and some] home ownership units.”

The CDC also built the apartment building in Nags Head that now houses clients for the Outer Banks Room in the Inn in the winter and offers apartments for seasonal workers in the summer. That building, designed for emergency housing and nonprofit offices, played a significant role in the failure of the CDC.

“It [the CDC] faced strong headwinds during the during the banking crisis” of 2008-2009, Muller said, “We were doing debt service, and the building did not cover the debt,” Muller said. In 2011, “the state legislature cut funding for development corporations across the state…With the loss of that revenue, the program became unsustainable,” Muller said.

Hosing Task Force Vice Chair Malcolm Fearing told the Voice that, “I want to learn from those mistakes so we can be successful in our advocacy.”

“What we’re doing is a generational plan… I look at it like a beach nourishment. You start, you never end, right? So is housing,” he continued.

According to Fearing, initially the nonprofit will be looking at Dare County-owned properties to see if they can be developed. A chart at the end of the Task Force’s 2024 report indicates there are almost 640 acres of county owned land that do not currently have buildings on it, although 467 of that is the Mainland C&D Landfill site south of Manns Harbor.

It is unclear how much of the land the county owns is buildable. That, Fearing said, is being evaluated “through our {Task Force] Site Committee, geographically in the county.”

Initially, Creef indicated, housing would be created for public sector employees, identifying them as “the low hanging fruit, if you will.”

That would require legislative action from Raleigh. In North Carolina, local governments are not permitted to build and then lease an apartment to their employees. There is a road map, however, that would enable the use of county land for housing. In 2004, the state legislature passed legislation that allowed the Dare County Board of Education to work with the Dare Education Foundation to build teacher housing. The Foundation currently manages apartment buildings at Run Hill—24 units—in Kill Devil Hills and Buxton—12 units.

If the DEF model is followed, the nonprofit would either own the land or have control of it through a lease agreement.

But for Creef and Fearing, creating affordable apartment units is half of what needs to be addressed. Both say homeownership must be included in an affordable housing plan.

Creef, who has been researching successful affordable and workforce housing programs throughout the US, found that home ownership was often the key to sustaining an affordable housing model.

Aspen, Colorado as an example, has a homeownership program that includes financial assistance from local government for first time homebuyers. Considered a successful program, the homes include deed restrictions on resale.

“It’s not really seen as an investment property, the way you may see some property,” Creef said. “Most of the places out in Colorado have some sort of workforce employment component associated with their programs and a 10-year residency.”

The Aspen program has been in place since the 1980s, and Creef offers a cautionary note that addressing the affordable housing issue on the Outer Banks will require patience.

“It takes time,” she said. “When you look at all of the other flourishing and robust programs that are going on in other parts of the state, in another in other parts of the country, they’ve been in place for years.”