What each Lexington mayoral candidate would do to address housing problems
It often feels like nearly every issue in Lexington comes back to housing.
The city has seen massive increases in prices for both renters and buyers since 2020, not unlike many cities in the country. Different outlets have reported that Lexington’s increases are some of the highest in the nation, with one study recently showing Lexington was in the top 10 in the U.S. for rent increases.
Critics of Lexington’s housing costs point to a lack of supply. A 2024 study from EHI Consultants found that Lexington is short over 22,000 housing units, causing people to look elsewhere for housing. That same study estimates that, barring significant policy and construction changes, the shortage will exceed 30,000 by 2030.
Some statistics show Lexington’s population of young people is declining compared to surrounding counties, even as the University of Kentucky’s student population is growing.
Of the seven candidates vying for the city’s highest office this year, five told the Herald-Leader what they would do to make Lexington a more affordable city for its residents.
Skip Horine and Rama Asmani did not respond to the Herald-Leader’s primary election questions.
Linda Gorton: Keep investing in affordable housing
Incumbent Mayor Linda Gorton told the Herald-Leader price increases were largely coming from increases in construction costs. There’s not a lot the city can do about that, she said.
“Members of my team and I have met and are in discussions with local representatives of the building industry to understand challenges they face, such as increased costs of materials and numbers of skilled tradesmen, which have slowed their ability to construct homes,” she said.
But continued investments like the ones made in the city’s affordable housing fund, which is required to receive 1% of the city’s general fund budget every year, are key to addressing the issue, Gorton said.
Other work has been done to streamline development regulations and plan approval timelines. The industrial revenue bond, which developers can apply for through the city to get access to bonds with lower interest rates, has been expanded to encourage developers to build affordable and middle-income or “workforce” housing. A development liaison position has been proposed in Gorton’s latest city budget, a longtime request of some local developers.
On top of rising construction costs, Gorton said wage growth has not kept up with housing costs. Workforce training, such as that offered at the Lexington Workforce Resource Center in Davis Park, can help connect people to higher-paying jobs and resolve the issue from another angle.
Raquel Carter: Low housing supply is the problem to solve
Raquel Carter, who owns Guide Realty and has ties to the development community in Lexington, said the mayor’s initiatives on their own aren’t enough.
On top of rising construction costs, the leading causes for Lexington’s housing prices are a lack of supply and slow development processes, Carter said.
Carter would increase funding for the affordable housing fund, at least until the city made progress in closing its gap of needed homes.
She would also pursue zoning reforms that would allow “missing middle housing,” such as duplexes and townhomes, to be built throughout Lexington. Some properties on major corridors could be upzoned, or given a higher-density zone without having been asked to by a property owner in service of specific project, by the government. That would immediately allow property owners to build housing without moving through as many of the city’s planning processes.
“We will actively create housing opportunities across all price points by establishing a land bank, identifying vacant and underutilized properties, expanding adaptive reuse, and aligning higher-density housing with transit corridors and commercial areas,” she said.
Those approaches will make it easier to build housing without having too intense of an impact on existing neighborhoods, she argued.
If Carter were elected mayor, she says voters will be able to keep track of how these tactics are playing out through a public dashboard to track housing construction over time.
C.E. Huffman: More public housing, go after corporate developers
Some of Carter’s strategies, especially those focused on infill and redevelopment, overlap with C.E. Huffman’s vision for housing.
But Huffman has a simple diagnosis for why housing is so expensive: “Greed.”
“There are many slum lords in Lexington that simply have not been held accountable,” he said.
In order to address landlord issues, he would increase code enforcement on problematic landlords and penalize landlords with rental vacancies longer than five months.
He would also work on initiatives that help small, local developers have a leg up in bringing developments to fruition.
“Lexington housing sales are dominated by a few home developers,” he said. “This has created a monopoly that I will work to break up both through the legislative process or courts if necessary.”
In addition to working with small developers, Huffman wants to see large increases in funding for the public housing projects done through the Lexington Housing Authority.
Huffman is a public relations specialist at the University of Kentucky.
Darnell Tagaloa: We need to increase wages in Lexington
Darnell Tagaloa, business development manager at iHeartMedia, told the Herald-Leader a lack of housing supply and stagnant wages are the chief cause behind the city’s housing crisis.
“We don’t have enough units, and too many residents are priced out of what is available,” he said.
Efforts to bring higher-paying jobs to Lexington and “raise the median wage” will go a long way to making the city more affordable.
Financial literacy trainings could be provided by the city to help workers learn how to save for a down payment and navigate loan processes for securing a home.
He also said he would “expand housing supply through targeted infill development, zoning adjustments where appropriate, and incentives for developers who include affordable units in their projects.”
Greg O’Neal: Taxes, rising building costs behind crisis
Professional landscaper Greg O’Neal simply said, “Raising taxes on rental property owners is the chief cause of higher rent. Rising home sale prices are due to the rise of building material costs.”
To address the housing crisis, he would work to shorten the timeline for development approvals by the city. A 2021 study found it took as much as 521 days for a development plan to get approved, although some recent changes to local planning regulations required by state law may bring that timeline down.
O’Neal also said he would “work with Black leaders in the community to ensure a fair and level-minded actionable plan” to develop Lexington’s urban core without negatively impacting historically Black neighborhoods.
What about the urban service boundary?
Whether to expand the city’s urban service boundary, which confines development to the center of Fayette County, has played a large role in previous mayoral elections.
But thanks to a recently adopted plan that sets a uniform, data-driven process to decide when to expand the boundary, mayors will have less direct say in expansion than they have had in the past.
All candidates, excluding C.E. Huffman, said they supported that plan, which is called the Lexington Preservation and Growth Management Plan.
Huffman did not offer any specific critiques of the for the growth management plan, but told the Herald-Leader, “We need to focus on developing grounds that have already been broken instead of developing the most fertile farmlands in the country … I want to protect farmlands at all costs.”
Gorton, who opposed the 2023 urban service boundary expansion approved by the council, said she wished the plan incorporated data for commercial and industrial land alongside its data for land needed for housing. Still, she is supportive of following the guidelines of the plan.
Carter, who advocated for the 2023 boundary expansion, said the new growth management plan could “progress toward closing our housing gap, infrastructure capacity and condition, development approval rates, and timelines from application to completion” for housing projects in its data.
Tagalao said he would work to make sure the plan is followed as written and that it does not lead to any undue development in “historically significant neighborhoods,” which “should be a last resort for high-impact development.”
O’Neal simply said he supported the growth management plan.
