I’d like to thank the Charlotte City Council for the mind-numbingly brilliant affordable housing plan they have concocted. It’s still a rough outline, mind you, but it has the potential to guarantee full-time employment for a team of investigative reporters for years to come. Oops! That’s right. No one does real investigative reporting in Charlotte anymore except Creative Loafing. Oh well. More readers for us.
There’s a little something to offend everyone and help almost no one while appearing to serve all in this plan. As a person who lives in a home worth roughly $80,000, I have a hard time comprehending, as I struggle to pay the mortgage each month, why my city tax dollars will be used to subsidize someone who makes more than I do so that they can move into a $90,000-plus home and politicians can claim they are addressing our affordable housing “crisis.”
Pick up a phone and ask a realtor if there’s a crisis, as Creative Loafing did this spring. She’ll tell you there isn’t. I doubt that I would get even full value for my home right now if I put it on the local market, because the market is glutted with houses in all affordability ranges, including those worth $85,000 to $150,000. But for some reason, city leaders are hell-bent on subsidizing more.
But point this conundrum out publicly, as I have, and you can expect to be accused by members of council and the city’s well-credentialed, technically useless do-gooders of being against helping poor people and single mothers and African-Americans. Well, my cold-hearted “agenda” may have been questioned, but for some reason no one is questioning theirs.
It’s right there in black and white in the proposed City of Charlotte Housing Policy, folks. The housing trust fund money, or the $40 million voters will be asked to approve in the fall, will be used to fund the development of single family homes for families making up to $48,320 a year.
Many of these “affordable” projects will probably look like the one city council approved last Monday. The city pumped a $1.3 million land subsidy into the 186-unit development in First Ward that will subsidize 76 of those units at a rate of $17,105 a unit, so that the economically afflicted who make $36,240 a year can move into uptown homes, condos, etc. worth $107,359.
Meanwhile, down at the Charlotte Housing Authority headquarters on South Boulevard, authority board members — the two who are cognizant of their surroundings, anyway — sit around Tuesday mornings trying to figure out how to pay for maintenance to crumbling public housing structures that shelter the poorest of the poor. There’s no solution, because there isn’t enough money.
Of course, the city’s new, more affordable housing policy has a solution for struggling low-income renters. You see, the city’s developers are going to take care of them. It may sound hard to believe, but it’s true. The city will let developers build extra units per acre when they come begging for rezonings if they make a certain percentage of those units affordable to lower income people, though exactly how affordable those units would have to be to whom won’t be dealt with until the spring. This assumes, of course, that developers will want to build the extra units per acre on top of their rezoning request, and that the economy heats back up. If not, oh well.
But the greatest irony in the whole plan has to be the aptly named Housing “TRUST” Fund. Here’s how it appears that that will work. The voters approve at least $40 million in bonds. Then we trust seven part-time political hacks appointed by city council, with virtually no legal liability for what happens to the money, to “oversee the fund operations.”
Given Charlotte’s track record with allowing private citizens to manage millions in city, state and federal housing subsidy dollars, this is a very unwise idea, as I am sure the FBI will attest.
Over the last four years in Charlotte, hundreds of thousands — it could turn out to be millions — of federal, state and local dollars have been misspent, mismanaged, misplaced and otherwise misappropriated into the wrong pockets by quasi-independent boards of political appointees. The outcome is so predictable, and yet council does it again and again.
Appoint them. Pass them the money. The money disappears or runs out. Board members scatter. City council members publicly beat up the board and remind the public that none of it is their fault. Then, unless the FBI sticks its nose in city business, city officials close the book on the whole unfortunate affair without further investigation. Months later, the board members come out of hiding and many are reappointed to similar boards with direct management oversight of. . .guess what? City, state and federal housing money.
City leaders know that this doesn’t work. So unless they are deliberately trying to line the pockets of the same well-dressed folks who always wind up sitting on these committees, why the trust fund is being set up this way is beyond me when it would be so simple to fix the problem.
City officials can have all the trust fund committees they want as long as, for once, there is at least one person directly responsible for managing this money and that person is a city employee who reports directly to the city manager.
I’m sorry. Did I use the word responsible? *
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2001.
