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Since March 2023, residents of Cary's Chatham Estates Mobile Home Community have been organizing their neighborhood through ONE Wake in response to the pending sale of their property. Roughly 600 adults and children call Chatham Estates home, and 50 small businesses owners have built their livelihoods in the adjacent Chatham Square shopping center.

You can view their testimony here, and you can learn more about the Chatham Estates community here. 

The displacement of communities like Chatham Estates represents a worsening, town-wide trend: essential workers like teachers, nurses, construction workers, house cleaners, and retail workers increasingly cannot afford to live in Cary. Since 2010, the town has added roughly 20,000 jobs in these occupations. However, over the same period of time, the town has lost roughly 3,900 rental units affordable to workers in these occupations due to rising rents, and affordable homeownership is almost impossibly out of reach.

ONE Wake and Chatham Estates residents have organized three major actions so far as part of this campaign:

- a 600 person, non-partisan assembly with candidates for Cary Town Council on September 18 during which all candidates present pledged to support fair treatment and compensation for Chatham Estates residents;

- a 112 person action at the February 8 Cary Town Council meeting to support the proposed "Stable Homes Cary" initiative which would provide case management and direct financial assistance to low income Cary residents displaced by new development.

- 120 Chatham Estates residents and supporters attended the March 14 Cary Town Council meeting to successfully urge the Council to vote YES  on the Stable Home Cary initiative.

Now, ONE Wake member Dorcas Ministry is working with the Town of Cary to design and implement the Stable Homes Cary initiative. In the meantime, residents remain organized, and await updates regarding the sale of the property (still on the market as of 8/26/24).

Media Coverage: 

Families Living in Cary’s Chatham Estates Mobile Home Park Fear Displacement

‘This is home’: Families, elderly fear for future if Cary mobile home park is sold

Cary mobile-home tenants fear displacement. Could this plan help?