He puts people in affordable urban housing
Gregg Warren leads DHIC, which has built more than 1,000 affordable housing units

Reprinted with permission from the The News & Observer
By Richard Stradling

In some ways, Gregg Warren is a typical developer. He keeps his eyes open for vacant land and complains
about development fees.  He looks at home in a hard hat, standing on a balcony at his latest project, an
apartment building in Cary, showing visitors where condos and townhouses will come next. "See all those
beautiful trees?" Warren asks, pointing to a wall of green on the edge of the site.  "Well, those need to
come down."  Warren jokes about playing the evil developer role, but the truth is many people think of him
as a do-gooder.  For 19 years he has headed DHIC Inc., a nonprofit organization that has built more than
1,000 homes and apartments for low-income families and senior citizens and has hundreds more in
the works.  “He's really a pace-setter," says Lanier Blum, a housing planner for the Self-Help Credit Union
in Durham.  "DHIC has been incredibly productive over the years and has done such a variety of
developments in Raleigh and the surrounding area.  They've been the first to try a lot of things in the
field, so they're really leaders."

Here's a sampling of DHIC's work under Warren's leadership:
• The Cary project, Highland Village, will put 258 homes on 17 acres — an urban village for low-and middle-
  income families and senior citizens in the heart of one of the region's most affluent suburbs.  At $35 million,
  it is by far the costliest development in DHIC's 30-year-history.
• Lennox Chase, a 37-unit apartment building for homeless men and women opened on Lake Wheeler Road
  in Raleigh last year.
• Meadowcreek, a 68-lot subdivision in Southeast Raleigh, where homes start at $105,000.  One of the homes,
  with a soaring ceiling and skylight in the living room, is featured in this month's Parade of Homes, where local
  builders showcase their best work.  "We're trying to change the expectations and surprise people," Warren says.
  This doesn't look like a starter home, does it?"

Improving lives
Warren, 54, grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and went to college during the 1960s, when the desire to save the world was
contagious.  In graduate school at Chapel Hill in the early 1970s, Warren decided he would do his part through
housing and community development.  "I felt it could impact on people's lives very directly," he says.  Warren
considered going back to Ohio, to help save the "rust-bucket cities" he knew growing up.  Instead, after two
years as a housing planner for the Triangle J Council of Governments, he went to Pittsboro, where he became
the first executive director of the Chatham County Housing Authority in 1976.  One of his Chatham projects still
ranks among his favorites: buying 46 small mill houses from the owners of the Bynum cotton mill, fixing them up,
installing indoor plumbing and selling them cheap to the tenants who had lived in them for years.

The idea was to convert all those hard-working mill workers into homeowners," he says.  Warren became president
of Downtown Housing Improvement Corp. in 1985, when it was a two-person operation with an uncertain future.
Raleigh had created the agency to renovate homes in older neighborhoods and help low-income people become
homeowners.  But when the city established a community development department, it moved many of the agency's
employees onto the city payroll.

Warren not only kept the organization alive, he expanded its reach beyond the inner city.  Now known by its acronym,
DHIC has built homes in Apex, Cary, Garner, North Raleigh, Wake Forest and, soon, Siler City.

Is focus too broad?
DHIC's push into the suburbs has left a bad feeling among some in Southeast Raleigh.  Tyler Toulon, who served on
DHIC's board until last year, would like to see the organization do more projects like Meadowcreek in Southeast
Raleigh, where he thinks the need is greatest.  "When I'm going out to Siler City, I wonder why we're doing this,"
says Toulon, who now heads the housing committee for the Southeast Raleigh Assembly, an economic development
group appointed by the city.  "I don't think we should be exhausting our resources way out there." DHIC has not
forsaken inner-city Raleigh, Warren says.  Construction should begin next year on Carlton Place, an 80-unit complex
on a city-owned block just east of downtown.  But Warren believes strongly in providing affordable housing throughout
the Triangle, so people can live near their jobs.  In addition, he says, if Wake County's neighborhoods were better
integrated economically, schools would be too, cutting down on the need for extensive busing.

Warren works with architects and builders to try to make DHIC's homes and apartments fit well in any setting.  He
decided, for example, that Lennox Chase, the apartment building for homeless people, would be more attractive from
the street if it looked like a home in Hayes Barton, with a large front porch and a hipped roof with dormers.  "He pushes
us," says Can Jones, architect with Cline Design Associates in Raleigh, which has designed several projects for DHIC.
"He doesn't want his affordable housing projects to look like affordable housing projects."

Branching out
DHIC has branched out in other ways as well, by providing access to computers and summer camp scholarships to
residents of some of its apartment complexes.  It also runs a homeownership center that provides counseling to help
first-time homebuyers clear up their credit and navigate the buying process.  Warren's greatest skill, says Richard
Moehring, DHIC's board chairman, is something people don't see in the finished product: putting together the financing.
As a nonprofit, DHIC must cobble together government grants and loans as well as tax credits and other investments
from banks and other institutions.  The financing for Heritage Village alone comes from 20 sources, including the town
of Cary, Wake County and the N.C, Housing Financing Agency.  "He's got a lot of contacts, and he can arrange very
creative financing," says Moehring, a partner with Craig Davis Properties, a Cary-based development company.  
With his contacts and building experience, Warren could easily get more lucrative work with a for-profit company.
He gets offers now and then, but he believes too strongly in DHIC's mission to leave.  "I like being a developer with a
“white hat," he says, "even if I do knock down a few trees every now and then."


Gregg Warren
Born:  Oct. 21,1949, in Toledo, Ohio
Education:  Bachelor's in general studies, Ohio University, 1971; master's in city and regional planning, UNC-Chapel Hill, 1974
Career:  Regional planner, Triangle J Council of Governments. 1974-1976: en-executive director. Chatham County Housing
Authority. 1976-1979: N.C. Division of Community Assistance. 1979-1985; president, DHIC, 1985-present
Favorite Development Project:  "It's like your children.  Who can pick a favorite?"
Hobbies: Cycling, gardening, working on an old farmhouse in the Virginia mountains





Reprinted with permission from the The News & Observer, North Carolina
By Richard Stradling
Photo by Mel Nathanson

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