When you live in a town — little or large — that considers itself heavily civically involved, it seems like there's almost always some kind of storm in a teacup brewing over a local issue.
"Affordable housing" has long been a hot-button issue around here, on account of the fact that the city's general process of "gentrification" has left behind a lot of the people who serve the hospitality industry and retail trade finding themselves completely unable to live here.
Part of the problem is we don't really have any affordable suburbs so these folks who are making close to minimum wage are now faced with the only feasible way to work in town is to be willing commute 25 miles (40km) or more each way to come to their minimum wage jobs.
Of course the problem officialdom doesn't want to look at is the fact that the quality of services for the increasingly wealthy population base around here is declining because the very services that makes this an attractive place to move to are increasingly shuttering their doors and cutting back on hours because they can't be staffed, because the people who are going to staff them can't afford to live here.
With that bit of preamble out of the way, yet another project has come to the table in which a little used golf course outside the actual city limits is being considered for a mixed-use development including affordable housing.
Recently the opening proposal for the first phase came to the table before the planning commission and it shows — once again — that the people proposing these things (the developers and city planners) have absolutely no idea what "affordable" is or they simply don't want to offer affordable housing.
To wit, the official first plan called for a parcel of land being split into a quarter acre lots with homes in the $600,000 to $800,000 range.
I don't know on what planet $600,000 to $800,000 constitutes affordable housing! What's more, I can't see how on earth anybody making $15.00 an hour can possibly qualify to purchase a home in that price range!
Using one of the many popular online calculators, just five minutes of adding a few numbers would tell you that in order to actually afford such a home you would need to have an annual income between $180,000 and $240,000! What on earth does that have to do with affordable anything?
Of course a chorus of protests have gone up over this, but there are also many supporters among the population base practicing a certain kind of NIMBY-ism, not wanting to have affordable housing on account of it supposedly "lowering their property values" and yet at the same time preaching the importance of affordable housing because local services are going away and they want those local services to be available.
From where I'm sitting, that really reeks of somebody wanting their toast buttered on both sides!
Of course, the above is not anything new in our small city. It seems that every time somebody comes up with a proposal for affordable housing that may sound good on paper (at the very start) it invariably gets run through some kind of gentrification process that turns it from something real people can actually afford into a beautiful Club Med layout that completely misses the mark for the people it's intended for.
Meanwhile, I was downtown running a couple of errands the other day and noticed that the ubiquitous "For Lease Corporation" has more and more signs up in the windows and several long-term retail merchants have recently closed their doors for good.
No telling where this will all end, but I am a little bit worried for the future of our surroundings.
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