Samuel Gunter, executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition.

North Carolina faces a dire shortage of affordable housing. One need merely talk to friends and family members – even those with middle class incomes – to understand just how difficult it is to find affordable rental housing, much less homeownership opportunities.

That said, the numbers are bleak. The National Low Income Housing Coalition released a report this past summer entitled “Out of Reach: The High Cost of Housing” which showed how the wages that millions of hourly workers are earning don’t come close to what’s necessary. In North Carolina, a full-time worker must earn a minimum of $27.14 per hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment. So how did we get here, how are policies in Washington deepening the crisis and what should we be doing? Back in August, Newsline got a chance to explore these questions and more in an extended conversation with the executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition, Samuel Gunter.

In Part One of our extended conversation with the executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition, Samuel Gunter, we dug into some of the details of our state and national affordable housing shortages, why the current market is failing millions, and why the latest budget cuts and policy changes emanating from Washington are not going to help.

In Part Two of our chat we turned to several related matters, including the way in which natural disasters and the Trump administration’s immigrant deportation policies are dramatically worsening the situation and how the recent Trump executive order targeting homeless people for arrest or involuntary commitment represents another significant step in the wrong direction.

Click here to listen to the full interview with Samuel Gunter.

This is a rebroadcast of our interview that originally aired on August 3, 2025.