Greensboro is facing a housing shortage.

The Greensboro City Council often discusses the shortage of affordable housing, but the housing shortage is not restricted to affordable housing. In fact, the overall housing shortage exacerbates the affordable housing shortage by raising the cost of all housing due to supply and demand issues.

So it is good news that Greensboro, in the first six months of 2023, rezoned more property than it did in all of 2022, and nearly equal to the amount in 2021.

According to a report from the Greensboro Planning Department, from January through June of this year the city rezoned or annexed and zoned 887 acres, with the potential to add about 2,482 dwelling units to the city.

In 2011, the state passed new regulations on annexation that made it extremely difficult for a city to annex property unless the property owner requested annexation. So almost all annexations since 2011 have been at the request of the property owner, which greatly changed the way cities in North Carolina can grow.

In the first six months of 2023, Greensboro annexed 164 acres, with 87 of those acres zoned residential and 76 acres zoned industrial. The land was zoned for 485 multi-family dwelling units and 163 single-family dwelling units, for a total of 648 new dwelling units in Greensboro.

The city also rezoned 723 acres with 135 acres rezoned residential and 302 acres rezoned industrial. Of the land rezoned residential 93 percent was for multifamily residential, which has the potential for 1,700 dwelling units, and 7 percent was rezoned for single-family residential with the potential for 134 new single-family homes.

The residential rezoning could provide a total of 1,834 new dwelling units for Greensboro.

In the past two and a half years, through annexation and original zoning and rezoning, the city has approved 13,278 dwelling units.

With all of the economic development and new jobs coming to the area, Greensboro is going to need all of those new dwelling units and more.