It was nice to open up the Isthmus and see Carousel Bayrd’s smiling face. However, what she had to say, was nothing to smile about. Allied Drive. There is so much promise in what could be. Our opportunities are unique. We have the ability to do something different than we have ever done before. We have the opportunity to help lift families out of poverty. However, we need the political will.
“BRIEF” HISTORY
Last April, over a year ago, the Common Council voted to authorize the city to bid on 9 buildings on Allied Drive, adjacent to two additional buildings we owned. We purchased them in May and hired Meyer Management to start emptying the buildings. In June we authorized money to hire a consultant to help us plan a process to plan for Allied Drive. In September, we held a community meeting to start to plan what we would do with this 9 acre site that we now owned. Which is ridiculous, as I have been asking since March 2006, what we are going to do with these properties. We started not renewing leases of the people who lived in the buildings and people in the area started getting evicted due to City actions. Last January, I introduced a couple resolutions so that we could finally have a discussion about what we were going to do with the properties and to allow people being evicted due to nuisance actions to live in the City-owned properties. The resolution on how affordable the units would be was referred to the Allied Drive Task Force and they came up with their (preliminary) recommendations (I don’t think that is the final version, but I can’t find a link on-line. What I have on paper is different and dated 3-22-07.)
WHERE WE ARE NOW
Last Thursday, the staff presented their response to the Allied Drive Task Force recommendations. Unfortunately, there is no link in legistar for their response. You had to attend the meeting to get a copy of it. Or, read the recap in the Isthmus this week.
The staff presentation that I saw, was not quite what people were expecting, as Carousel explained in the Isthmus article. My understanding is that when the consultant explained things, it got a little better.
CAN’T USE TIF FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING?
What’s concerning me at the moment is this part of the article:
Mark Olinger, director of Madison’s Planning Department, says the city can’t afford to do more. Offering low-income units “requires significant subsidies,” and there are no federal programs to help. The city can use a tax-credit program through the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, but Olinger says the maximum amount of tax credits a city can get through WHEDA in a single year is $750,000. Building just the nine low-cost units will take $650,000 in tax credits.
Also, the city can’t use tax-increment financing to fund the new units because it has already poured $6 million into the neighborhood, paying for streets and bike path improvements and funding a private housing development at the old SuperSaver site on Verona Road. “At some point,” says Olinger, “we need to recover our costs.”
Um, we are recovering our costs (see page 11, TID 29). Looks like we’re making $600,000 a year. The TID doesn’t have to close until 27 years. I think it opened in 1998, so we have until 2025 to pay it off. At $600,000 per year we can pay off the $7.5M in a little over 12 years or by 2019, with 6 years to spare, and that’s if very little of the property value changes. In other words, we don’t need to recover costs because we will if we do nothing at this point. In other words, we can make the housing even more affordable.
I have to ask, when was the policy decision made that we can’t do more affordable housing because we need to recover our costs? And even more interesting, perhaps for a separate blog, who decided that the CDA was going to be the developer of the project? And does the CDA know? It’s been nearly a year that we’ve owned the properties without a plan, we’re losing money on the empty properties, and we seem no closer than we were to begin with despite my efforts. Who’s running this ship?
