Last week, Marc Eisen wrote a piece in the Isthmus on the potential sale of several Kozak properties, the majority of which are on the 600 block of E Gorham/Johnson. While there is decent debate about what could and should be there, it was the ending of the article that caused me concern.
After explaining how difficult and expensive it is to turn rental properties into owner-occupied housing, Eisen has this to say:
At the same time, the city isn’t without financial tools to help homebuyers and developers. The interesting question to ask is why the city isn’t looking at restoring these properties as part of its affordable housing strategy. . .
My response is as follows:
a. Where are these financial tools that he’s talking about? In case he didn’t notice, every time we try to get money into affordable housing, such as the Affordable Housing Trust Fund we have to fight with the conservate wing of the common council to get it. We have TIF and the depleted Capital Revolving Fund and that’s about it for City resources. (The CDBG office has some federal pass through money, but the City doesn’t really use its own resources for affordable housing.) Even worse, TIF is a pretty difficult way to create affordable housing because the way TIF works is if it creates maximum increment and you don’t create the maximum increment with affordable housing.
b. If its very expensive to get the homes from rental to ownership, why would we pour even more money into these units to make them affordable? Seems like some terribly expensive affordable housing and we could spend the money, if we actually had it, in a much more effective way.
The other thing that bothered me was that the article seemed to imply that there wasn’t a plan for this neighborhood. I beg to differ. In fact, they are in the middle of updating their plan at the moment.
More to come on this topic, I’m sure.
