More City Politics Stupidity: Affordable Housing That Isn't!

As a former member of the commercial base of our town I like to keep my eye on local politics and most of the time just feel grateful that I'm no longer part of that circus!

Like many towns in the US, one of the problems we have had here for a very long time is a lack of affordable housing. Reasonably affordable apartments. This has largely been caused by the fact that out-of-town investors will buy up existing properties, then totally gut them and turn them into "luxury condominiums" instead.

Not only does this mean that rental units are removed from the market and being replaced by owner units, it also means that dwellings with a potentially affordable rent of $800-$1200 are replaced with units that cost maybe $3000 a month to rent.

When I first arrived in this town one of the kind of nice things about this place was the almost "European model" we had here, in which our main central business district had a lot of individually owned shops and the buildings above were affordable enough apartments where the shopkeepers could live.

Fast forward 20 years and now most of the shopkeepers can't even afford to live in town anywhere and end up either commuting (and burning a lot of gas) from about 30 miles away, or spending an hour and a half each way going by public transit to get to their shops or other places of work.

Of course that is just one end of the problem because we live in a tourist town which means we have a very large service and hospitality industry. That means we have hotel workers, restaurant and other food service workers, and retail workers in significant numbers.

While these can be steady and decent jobs the incomes from these are generally towards the minimum wage range. But where are these people going to live? Certainly not in $3,000/month condos.

So our city — led by a city government that is made up largely of wealthy transplants from other parts of the country — in their infinite wisdom secured the right to use a particular 12-acre parcel for unaffordable housing project.

But, in typical fashion, they first spent $800,000 on consultants to come up with a plan for how to use the land, that — of course — that City Council in conjunction with these consultants managed to come up with a plan that has absolutely nothing to do with what lower income people actually need in terms of housing!

This means that our tax dollars basically were spent on an $800,000 study that produced an Urban Development project that essentially is a glorified Club Med with features and amenities that are basically relevant only to people who were in the top 10% of the population, income wise!

It is a relatively typical example of the cluelessness of the people who are running this city of ours taking something that was once a quaint and desirable tourist destination and turning it into an unaffordable Disneyland caricature of a quaint artist community.

The project has since been scrapped and the land remains unused, while the affordable housing issue persists. Several proposals that involved prefabricated modular housing that could be put up for as little as $80,000 per unit have been rejected for various reasons...

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