APB Archives

AFFORDABLE HOUSING (Oct 24, 03)

RULES COMMITTEE ACTION (Oct 24, 03)

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Yesterday the Council Committee on Rules, Finance and Intergovernmental Relations (Rules) Committee took up the question of putting a measure on the March 4, 2004 ballot to get money for new low-income housing. In the end, after it heard the testimony and discussed the issue, it decided against the ballot measure and asked the Manager to study the issue further.
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That made a lot of folks unhappy, especially some who hitched their personal wagons to the affordable housing star in the hope that housing affordability was the route to fame. The Rules action does nothing to add housing or increase affordability, but also gives the poor communities time to prepare themselves. As you might know, the Planning Department is dead set on packing as much new density and new subsidized housing as it can into the poor communities South of Montgomery Field, preserving low density and pleasant surroundings in the suburban-like communities to the North. That's always been the city's policy-under-the-sheets, but now it's being implemented by the Planning Department's City of Villages strategy.
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City Heights, as you remember, opted OUT of the City of Villages strategy exactly because the strategy is a technique for packing as many poor people as possible into the inner-city communities. The talk about transit corridors and live-work and mixed-use and transit-oriented design is a way to push the idea of more poor people in the inner-city areas and more infrastructure into the newer, nicer, semi-rural areas. You aren't surprised, are you?
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I don't know what future actions the Rules Committee or the Land Use and Housing Committee will take about the affordable housing task force report, but spreading low-income housing fairly among communities is what they (and the City Council) SHOULD do. City Heights and other poor areas shouldn't be pushed back into the 1970's when Ray Huffman and other construction industry "box-builders" made money by destroying our single family areas and replacing them with ugly apartments.
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Getting more housing that's more affordable to more of our neighbors in City Heights is a good idea. Having it shoved down our throats (or up some other orifice) over our objections, in 20- or 50- or 100-unit chunks, badly designed, with inadequate parking, owned and managed by absentee companies, or worse, by the Housing Commission's non-profit corp.) is a bad idea. I hope you agree.
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City Heights is on the correct path to revitalization, just as we are going. If low-income families are allowed to live in the newer, better equipped communities to the North, there won't be as much demand for big apartment buildings in City Heights. We can, should, and will see apartments built here. They must improve us and our neighbors, not add to our burdens.
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