Open letter to Durham Elected Officials:
Elected Officials, Greetings:
At the September 8 CC meeting, Councilmember Cook called out the exaggerated (or just false) numbers in Bowen’s Housing Gap Report. The report is nothing but a lobbying tool for developers. I am saddened that a majority of our elected officials blindly accept the Bowen report with no understanding of how “research” can be bent depending on the demands of the paying customer. When it comes to for profit research, such as Bowen National Research, money talks, accuracy walks (away).
Bowen’s North Carolina Housing Gap report was commissioned and paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, the Home Builders Association and the NC Realtors. These are all arms of the development community. If Bowen failed to find an urgent need for more building, here and everywhere they service, their client base would likely disappear. In fact, I could not find a Bowen study that failed to find a severe housing shortage anywhere in the country. It’s what they do.
Almost all of Bowen’s customers are from the building community or, to a lesser extent, local governments following the recommendations of developers.
I asked Dr. Google what was the true purpose of Bowen’s North Carolina Housing Supply Gap Analysis and here’s Google’s answer:
No, the Bowen National Research “Housing Supply Gap Analysis” for North Carolina was not peer-reviewed.
It is a commercial consulting product, not an academic study. There is a structural difference between how this report was created and how peer-reviewed research operates:
Corporate and Trade Association Sponsorship
The report was explicitly commissioned and funded by a coalition of powerful building industry trade and lobbying groups:
- The NC Chamber Foundation
- The North Carolina Home Builders Association (NCHBA)
- NC REALTORS®
Because it was funded by organizations whose core mission is to promote real estate development, market expansion, and deregulation, the report was produced as advocacy-supporting data rather than a neutral academic inquiry.
Lack of Independent Institutional Review
In traditional peer review, a manuscript is submitted to an independent academic journal where anonymous, unrelated experts in the same field critically tear apart the methodology, data sources, and biases before it can be published.
The Bowen report completely bypassed this process. It was released directly to the public, the press, and the General Assembly as a PDF marketing and policy tool by the NC Chamber. While the economic impact addendum was conducted by Dr. Michael Walden (an emeritus professor at NC State), he did so as the President of Walden Economic Consulting—operating as a paid private consultant, not through a university peer-review board.
Proprietary and Closed Methodology
Academic research requires transparency so other scientists can replicate the results. Bowen National Research uses proprietary market feasibility models. While they list standard secondary data sources (like the U.S. Census or ESRI), their exact formulas for calculating “gaps” and the specific weights given to developer interviews are closed-source. [I wonder how much weight Bowen gave to developer interviews – you know, the guys Bowen relies on to stay in business.]
The 2024 Housing Supply Gap Analysis was funded and pushed by the NC Chamber Foundation, the North Carolina Home Builders Association, and NC REALTORS®. In policy debates, the report functions as an authoritative, data-heavy lever to pressure local governments into deregulation.
Fabricating a Monolithic Crisis to Loosen Zoning
The report emphasizes that North Carolina’s housing gap impacts “all income groups” across all 100 counties.
The Industry Benefit: Local builders use this “universal crisis” narrative to lobby Durham’s city and county managers against strict land-use rules, setback requirements, and affordable housing mandates. When the Home Builders Association can point to an enormous [statewide] “764,000-unit deficit,” they argue that any local regulations—like environmental protections or affordable unit requirements—are simply roadblocks worsening a historic crisis.
Masking the Luxury Oversupply
By blending different tiers of housing into a massive, generalized macro-deficit, the report obscures the reality on the ground in cities like Durham.
The Industry Benefit: Commercial reports from groups like Lee & Associates show that Durham actually has a high 11.90% multifamily vacancy rate due to an aggressive oversupply of high-end, market-rate apartments. Bowen’s methodology masks this saturation. A builder can use the Bowen report to justify building another luxury complex by claiming the “overall county gap” is still high, even though the specific type of housing being built does nothing to solve the lower-income deficit.
The strategic alignment between Bowen’s metrics and the building industry’s goals operates through several mechanisms:
[T]he math relies on assumptions that don’t match how a real-world market functions.
Why the statewide 764,000 need Figure Is Highly Disputed: The “Cost-Burden” Substitution: A massive portion of that “gap” is calculated by looking at households spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Labeling a family that needs a more affordable rent check as a “missing physical building” inflates the numbers. The issue is often stagnant wages, not a literal lack of roofs.
Ignoring the Existing Pipeline: These macro-models frequently look at a snapshot in time and fail to fully account for the massive amount of multifamily and single-family inventory already under construction or recently permitted.
The Roommate/Multi-Generational Assumption: The algorithm assumes that every adult or sub-family living with roommates or relatives wants and needs their own independent, brand-new housing unit immediately. It completely discounts cultural preferences, economic pooling, or voluntary co-living.
Baking in Best-Case Economic Fantasies: The demand models assume 100% realization of speculative job announcements from regional chambers of commerce. If a tech company announces 5,000 future jobs, the model instantly adds thousands of needed homes to the deficit, even if those hires are years away or never materialize. [Many expected corporate relocations have fallen through. Bowen does not consider recent layoffs and contraction of employment opportunities in the RTP, which have multiplied since the research was done in 2023 and published in 2024]
Ultimately, using that statewide 764,000 number as a blanket justification for local planning creates a massive mismatch on the ground—leading to overbuilding in luxury sectors while doing nothing to solve actual localized affordability.
Rebranding Poverty as a “Product Shortage”
By counting cost-burdened renters as a “missing physical unit” rather than as families needing better wages or direct rental assistance, the report shifts the solution entirely onto the private sector.
The Industry Benefit: This frames developer profits as a public good. It gives local politicians a powerful financial incentive to grant builders “free reign,” allowing municipal leaders to claim they are stimulating the local economy and creating jobs, while sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of low-income displacement and gentrification.
Summary
The Bowen report uses an aggregating methodology that maximizes the deficit number. While Bowen would defend its math as standard industry forecasting [if so, it would not be hiding it’s methodology behind “proprietary” self designed models and no part of their study would be “closed source.”] , the real-world application of the report is undeniably designed to give the building lobby a powerful statistical weapon to bypass local government regulations.
It’s not that hard to find better data that contradicts Bowen. Lee and Associates is a legitimate tool of investors and reports Durham’s multifamily vacancy rates have been around 12% (a glut) for several years. The vacancy rate for the second quarter of 2026 is 11.9 %. As you know, the state OBM’s projections sharply conflict with Bowen. Durham has surpassed OBM’S projected thirty year need for new housing in only six years.
Elected officials, use your critical thinking skills. The Bowen Housing Gap analysis is a tool of the building industry. You don’t have to be their tools, as well. Remember, the harm you allow by approving unnecessary massive developments is permanent. Our children and grandchildren will suffer from it with no way to reverse the damage. Your constituents deserve better. Be better.
Please use your critical thinking skills, and reject the development community’s massive ad campaign in the form of bought, biased, “research.”