Charlotte's Weak Leaders Bow To Wealthy White Citizens..."No Mini Ghettos"

Charlotte Citizens Protest Against Charlotte Affordable
Housing Project


The meeting started inside while people were still lining up outside. Hundreds showed up to hear more about a proposed public housing complex in the Ballantyne area. One by one, they fired questions and comments at the developers, Republic Development Group:

"What experience do you have creating something like this?"

"Can you not find a more suitable place than what is the southern gateway to our community?"

"Where I'm coming from is I don't want it here. My house is over one million dollars and I don't want the crap next to me."

The project took a hit Monday afternoon when the Charlotte Housing Authority issued a statement that it would not participate in the mixed income housing development. "Questions about certain aspects of the project's structure, including its density (the total number of apartment units relative to the cost of the land) and funding, prompted our decision," said Jennifer Gallman with the Housing Authority.

"We keep going," said Stuart Proffitt of Republic Development. Proffitt says he still hopes to build the 86 unit complex with another affordable housing developer. A representative from the Crosland Company told News Channel 36 the developer has asked if Crosland would manage the property if it were approved.

One man, who asked not to be identified, said he believed this was a case of "not in my backyard." "I live on the West side and this will be pushed to some other part of town," he said.

But opponents say that's not the case. They point to the fact that the proposed site, south of Ballantyne, off of Johnston Road, has no easy access to public sidewalks, little public transportation and already overcrowded schools.

Cynthia Jennings lives in the Ballantyne area. "People who live in low income housing want the same thing we all do. A nice place to live for their families. But the way the developer came in, through the back door, was sneaky and shady," she said.







Charlotte Leaders Pull Out Of Ballantyne Affordable Housing Deal


The Charlotte Housing Authority pulled out of a controversial public housing project for Ballantyne Monday, but the other developers of the project said the 86-unit apartment complex for low-income residents will continue.

The authority said it dropped the project at Johnston Road and Providence Road West because of concerns about its cost, which could be as much as $13 million.

But its decision comes after two weeks of intense opposition from many Ballantyne residents, who are objecting to what would be the area's first subsidized housing for low-income tenants.

The authority had partnered with Republic Development Group, a newly formed company that was seeking a rezoning change to make the apartment project possible.

"I don't know why they (CHA) aren't doing this," said Stuart Proffitt, part of Republic's two-person team. "I was surprised."

At a meeting Monday night with angry Ballantyne residents, Proffitt said he is seeking other partners with affordable housing experience to build the apartments, known as Ballancroft.

The loss of the authority as a partner means that 26 of the apartments that were to be reserved for people earning 30 percent of the area's median income won't also receive assistance from the federal government, Proffitt said.

A family of four earning just under $20,000 would qualify for those apartments.

Proffitt said that would be the only change to the complex. The rest of the units would be reserved for people earning 60 percent of the area's median income.

He declined to say who also might work on the apartments. Republic doesn't have the necessary experience to secure federal tax credits to make the project possible, he said.

Proffitt and his partner John Schwaller have an option to buy the 7-acre site at the southwest corner of the intersection. The land is currently zoned for offices. They want it rezoned for a neighborhood services designation, which would allow the apartments adjacent to a proposed bank.

If they don't receive the tax credits, they said the project could be built for residents who would pay market rates.

The Housing Authority issued a one-page press release Monday afternoon dropping out of the project. CHA spokesperson Jennifer Gallman said the authority has to balance the needs of providing as much housing as it can, along with the cost of doing so.

"Questions about certain aspects of the projects structure, including its density (the total number of apartment units relative to the cost of the land) and funding, prompted our decision," the release said.

On Friday, the authority had restated its commitment to the project. It said it was important to bring affordable housing to Ballantyne so low-income workers could live near where they work.

Mayor Anthony Foxx said he wanted to know why the authority dropped the effort. He said he was not familiar with all the details of the proposal because it had not yet come before City Council. He said dispersing affordable housing remains a priority.

Four years ago, the city codified its long-standing policy about spreading public housing throughout the city. Much of the city is now considered "prohibited" for new public housing because of low home ownership rates or existing subsidized complexes. Ballantyne is considered a "priority" for subsidized housing.

The plans for the 86 apartments drew roughly 300 people to a two-hour meeting Monday at Harrison United Methodist Church.

The meeting was punctuated with residents heckling the developers and cheering when they were grilled by neighbors.

Proffitt said that state law doesn't allow them to discuss the income levels of potential residents. He said his rezoning request should be scrutinized on how it will impact land use.

Residents then asked questions about the impact on schools and traffic. They also questioned whether there were enough sidewalks for residents. They also said the site is too far from mass transit.

"You say there will be strong access to transit. I just don't see that," Ballantyne resident Al Rutherford said.

Joel Stolz said he thought there would be more than 200 hundred students generated from the project - not the 20 public-school age children that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools projected.

Proffitt and Schwaller said the complex is expensive in part because they want it to blend in with the surrounding community.

There were some questions that dealt directly about the low-income residents.

One resident who didn't give his name said he didn't want public housing next to his million-dollar home

Another resident, Kevin Williams, said that's not why most people are against the rezoning.

"This isn't a NIMBY issue....We are angry about the rezoning," Williams said. "It's a 45-minute walk from your site to the bus stop."

The developers said they expect mass transit to serve the area eventually.

They also said a number of low-income residents have cars, and people who depend on buses won't choose to live there.

Residents also asked the developers about their contract with the authority, which was to pay them $20,000 to handle the rezoning costs and up to $50,000 if it were successful.

Proffitt and Schwaller said they aren't going to pay back the $20,000 after residents asked if they would.

Another resident asked Schwaller about his previous relationship with Ben Collins, who works at the authority. Collins and Schwaller had partnered two years ago to work on a real estate project in Cornelius, but that project fell through, Schwaller said.


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Sources: WCNC, McClatchy Newspapers, Ballantyne Scoop, Google Maps

New York City's Affordable Housing Program (Work In Progress)...Mayor Bloomberg's 5-Yr Plan

As New York City Adds Housing for Poor, Market Subtracts It


Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is closing in on a milestone: building or preserving 165,000 city-financed apartments and houses for low-, moderate- and middle-income families, the goal of a $7.5 billion housing plan he announced in 2002 and expanded in 2005.

It has already financed the creation or preservation of 94,000 units, including 72,000 for low-income households, city officials say.

But those efforts have been overwhelmed by a far larger number — the 200,000 apartments affordable to low-income renters that New York City has lost over all, because of market forces, during the mayor’s tenure.

The shrinking supply of these apartments, highlighted by researchers at New York University, illustrates not only the increasing strain that housing costs have had on this city of renters, but also the limits of the mayor’s success in providing the city’s poor with reasonable places to live. While the mayor’s plan has put thousands of low-income families in new or rehabilitated buildings and helped stabilize neighborhoods, it has been nearly drowned out by the twin waves of gentrification and rent deregulation.

“We’re losing units even with additions to the stock under the mayor’s housing plan,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing policy analyst for the Community Service Society, a nonprofit antipoverty group, and a member of a panel that advised the Bloomberg administration on housing in 2002. “I’m not knocking the plan. I’m just saying it hasn’t done much to stop the hemorrhaging of lower-rent units across the city.”

Including public housing, the number of apartments considered affordable to low-income households — those earning less than 80 percent of the city’s median income, or less than $37,000 — decreased to 991,592 from 1,189,962, a drop of nearly 17 percent, from 2002 to 2008. About 42 percent of the city’s households fit in that income category in 2008.

The data were supplied by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, which analyzed the city’s Housing and Vacancy Survey from 2002, 2005 and 2008. The center and other housing experts consider an apartment affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of a family’s income, or about $925 a month for a family earning $37,000.

Although the numbers present a gloomy picture, they did contain a glimmer of hope. The worst years were between 2002 and 2005, when the city lost affordable apartments at the highest rate of the mayor’s tenure. In the next three years, as the mayor’s plan took hold, the city actually gained about 8,000.

“We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we’re also not satisfied or done,” said Rafael Cestero, the city’s housing commissioner. “We can’t undo what happened between 2002 and 2005, but what happened during those years is exactly why we created the largest municipal housing plan in the nation’s history. What the data suggests is that the response is working.”

A majority of the 200,000 units in the Furman Center data — 137,000 apartments — had been part of the rent regulation system but were deregulated. In most cases, they became market-rate once their rent topped $2,000 and they became vacant, as allowed by the rent regulation system. Thousands of others had been in the state Mitchell-Lama or federal Section 8 programs, but were taken out of those subsidy programs by their owners and converted to market-rate apartments.

The affordability of all of the city’s 2.1 million rental apartments is of course beyond the control of Mr. Bloomberg and the city’s housing agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

But housing experts and tenant advocates say that the mayor has been far from powerless, and that his housing policy has suffered from a kind of tunnel vision, by focusing energy and resources on his 165,000-unit target rather than the larger pool of existing housing.

Tenant advocates have been pushing state legislators to make it harder to remove apartments from rent regulation, a move strongly opposed by landlords and the real estate industry. The mayor has been virtually silent on the issue, though he appoints the members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides the annual rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments. He proposed state legislation in 2003 that would prevent the loss of Mitchell-Lama units, but the measure failed and has become a low priority for the mayor, tenant advocates say.

“There needs to be a focus on preservation at the same level of intensity that there is for new development,” said Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit Brooklyn-based affordable housing and community development group. “It’s not as though things aren’t moving in the right direction. It’s that advocates have a different sense of urgency.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign said that the mayor intends to expand the housing plan by investing an additional $965 million, which will help preserve 10,000 more units of Mitchell-Lama housing than originally planned and stabilize apartment buildings that are overleveraged, meaning their debt is unsupportable by the income generated by rents, a widespread problem that has led to the physical and financial deterioration of many buildings.

The Housing and Vacancy Survey showed that in 2008, 29.4 percent of all renter households in the city paid more than 50 percent of their income toward rent, an increase from 25.5 percent in 2002. Experts call those families “severely rent burdened.” (The city’s median income in the Furman survey differed slightly from that in other recent surveys.)

The financial squeeze has a spillover effect. It leads to overcrowded conditions and illegally partitioned rooms. It contributes to the record number of homeless families in city shelters. It fills the halls of the city’s housing courts and fuels residential evictions, which have risen slightly to 25,027 in 2008, from 23,669 in 2006. And it causes many people to move out of the city.

A study prepared for the Bloomberg administration by the polling firm Harris Interactive found that 64 percent who moved out of the city cited housing costs as a major reason. The 2006 study was obtained by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group.

Before the recession, James Hadden was earning up to $1,000 a week cutting hair at a Harlem salon, but more recently he has taken home $400 to $700. So he has fallen behind on the $1,300-a-month rent on his one-bedroom apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up on Lenox Avenue. His landlord began asking him to pay weekly. “I’m going to go pay this man’s rent so he’ll stop calling me,” Mr. Hadden, 42, said Tuesday.

He said he was happy to be only 16 blocks from work; closer to the salon, on Fifth Avenue at 116th Street, rents are even more expensive. But he said he sometimes heard gunfire outside his building on Saturdays. “My family comes to visit me and I’m embarrassed to show them where I live,” he said.

Despite the net losses of affordable apartments, experts in the field are quick to praise Mr. Bloomberg on much of his housing record. The mayor’s plan has suffered only one major setback since it was unveiled in December 2002: Mr. Bloomberg’s goal of creating or preserving 165,000 units by 2013 was pushed back one year in late 2008 because of the recession.

Mr. Cestero, the housing commissioner, said the plan was on schedule and no further delays were expected. He said the preservation of existing affordable housing was the agency’s “No. 1 priority,” and he said the agency would “engage in the discussion” about rent regulation at the right time.

The plan relies on the rezoning of underused manufacturing areas, including the Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighborhoods in Brooklyn, that allowed developers to build larger buildings if they set aside some apartments as low-cost units. New units have also been created through the city’s Housing Development Corporation, which issues bonds and uses its corporate reserves to finance low-cost mortgages to affordable housing developers.

“I think the city has done an extraordinary job, more than any other place in America,” said Jerilyn Perine, executive director of the nonprofit Citizens Housing and Planning Council and the former city housing commissioner who helped create the mayor’s original plan in 2002. “You have to go to Europe to find another city that has this kind of robust, sustained housing policy and housing investment.”

Of the 94,000 units the administration counts as gains, fewer than half, about 35,000, are new. The rest are apartments that City Hall says it has preserved as affordable, by providing low-interest loans to rehabilitate them or keep them from leaving rent-subsidy programs..

Some housing experts say the loss of affordable units is evidence of the city’s economic vitality and a natural consequence of demand for affordable housing exceeding supply. As Ms. Perine wrote in the housing plan, there has never been a time in the city’s history when all of its population’s housing needs have been met with safe and affordable housing.

“I don’t think there’s a serious crisis in this area,” said Magda L. Cruz, a lawyer and an owner representative on the Rent Guidelines Board. “I do believe a big problem is employment, and salaries just not being high enough to sustain cost-of-living increases. That’s something the mayor plays a part in, but it doesn’t have to do with building new housing.”

Affordable housing is in such demand that most new apartments are awarded by lottery. Alan Ceballos, 30, said he was grateful to have won his two-bedroom apartment, costing $839 a month, in a new building on University Avenue in the Bronx.

Mr. Ceballos, who earns about $33,000 a year as a sales associate at a car rental agency, won the spot three years ago, allowing him to move out of a one-bedroom that cost $794. He and his wife had two children then, and now have three.

He said that traffic often speeds down the street and that people who hang out in a park by the building sometimes smash car windows; his own windshield has been broken. But he is happy with the building itself: its cleanliness, security, price and size.

“Before, it being a one-bedroom, it did not have enough closet space,” said Mr. Ceballos. Besides the extra room he now has, “the kitchen is bigger, the living room is bigger, so it’s adequate space now.”



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Sources: NY Times, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps

Atlanta Becomes 1st U.S. City To Eliminate All Its Large Public Housing Projects...Urban Renewal

MSNBC----



ATLANTA - The nation's bulldozer attack on crime and poverty will soon make Atlanta — home of the first public housing development — the first major city to eliminate all of its large housing projects.

Cities from Boston to Los Angeles are following its lead. For more than 15 years, housing officials across the country have been razing the projects where some 1.2 million families live and replacing them with a mix of higher-rent and subsidized apartments and homes.

Alexandria, La., has taken down at least 247 units. Buffalo, N.Y., has demolished about 1,000 aging homes. Atlanta expects to finish tearing down the last of its sprawling projects next June.

Advocates for the poor worry that not enough subsidized homes remain, and thousands of families are being dumped on the street. Less than half of the 92,000 units demolished by cities have been replaced with traditional public housing.

Most of the displaced residents have received vouchers to put them in privately owned housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledges, however, that it doesn't know what happened to thousands of families.

Some longtime residents feel like afterthoughts in an ambitious overhaul that is supposed to help them.

"I don't think it's fair," said Jeff Walker, who was forced out May 30 from Atlanta's Bankhead Courts project.

Even though drug violence there was once so brazen that mail carriers had police escorts, he said: "We didn't ask to be moved."

Crime moves in:

The housing projects in Atlanta date to 1936, when the nation's first public housing community, Techwood Homes, was built here. President Franklin D. Roosevelt heralded it as "a tribute to useful work under government supervision" and the first step in building a safety net for the working poor during the Depression.

Decades of cultural and policy shifts transformed that safety net into a permanent home for generations of families surrounded by disproportionately high crime.

When a 1992 report deemed roughly 86,000 public housing units "severely distressed," federal officials knew it was time for sweeping action, according to former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.

"There was no kind of forward-looking plan, and no commitment to dramatic change," said Cisneros, who in the early '90s helped craft what is known as the Hope VI program.

Hope VI would eventually provide $6.2 billion in federal grants for demolition, revitalization and planning. It also reversed long-standing HUD policy by letting housing authorities replace demolished units with Section 8 vouchers — coupons low-income families can use to cover rent with private landlords off site.

That meant the nation's more than 3,300 housing authorities could tear down blighted public housing and rebuild smaller, more easily managed neighborhoods while the vouchers would prevent anyone from being left homeless.

At least in theory.

Mixed-income housing:

In 1996, toward the end of Atlanta's makeover as host of the Olympics, the city pioneered the creation of mixed-income developments — former public housing communities demolished and rebuilt to include market-rate houses and apartments alongside a whittled-down number of public housing units. Mixing higher-income families with lower-income ones spurs the latter into self-improvement, housing officials say, while deconcentrating poverty.

"Something dramatic needed to occur," said Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renee Glover, who took over in the '90s, when Atlanta had a higher percentage of its population living in public housing projects than any other U.S. city.

She's used some $220 million in Hope VI and other development funds to help transform 14 developments in one of the nation's most ambitious public housing revampings.

Successes include the Villages of East Lake, a community of tidy duplexes and flower-lined porches built on the ruins of a public housing complex so violent that locals called it "Little Vietnam."

But such transformations are not to be enjoyed by everyone. The number of units in the complex was cut in half, and a 2007 Georgia Institute of Technology study found that just one-third of the original residents managed to resettle into the new mixed-income community.

Fate of the displaced:

Nationwide, HUD estimates Hope VI will eventually demolish 95,998 public housing units. A little more than half of those will be replaced with traditional public housing. HUD is also building more than 50,000 other units in mixed-income communities, which will range from semi-subsidized apartments with higher income requirements to market-rate houses.

So far, 17,911 displaced families have returned to revitalized communities. HUD expects a total of 22,510 families to return, a fraction of those displaced.

HUD records show the whereabouts of 12,595 families, many of whom faced eviction for lease violations, are unclear.

"We don't know whether or not those people who have been displaced are getting Section 8 vouchers to go someplace else, and whether someplace else is available," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Originally a supporter of public housing reform, she's come to question the program that's demolished thousands of units in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Waters has requested a demolition moratorium and 20,000 additional Section 8 vouchers to support displaced families, an option that comes with its own problems. Critics have long attacked Section 8 as a poorly run program that supports landlords for providing barely inhabitable housing.

A "temporary" place to stay?

Atlanta's leaders have set up safeguards to ease the transition, including incentives to encourage more private renters to accept Section 8 vouchers and counseling for families facing sudden change.

Glover believes pushing chronic public housing residents out is the only answer to breaking the cycle of poverty, and she's led many of the nation's housing authority leaders to the same conclusion.

Huntsville, Ala., Housing Authority CEO Michael Lundy has experienced it personally. As a child, Lundy lived in public housing until his family saved enough money to move out. Soon, his neighbors were teachers, musicians and entrepreneurs.

Lundy said he began considering college after he "all of a sudden realized that you know what, I can do all of those things."

His agency is looking to replace some of its 1,700 public housing units with mixed-income developments, and promoting self-sufficiency.

"Public housing should just be a temporary place to stay," Lundy said. "Not a way of life."



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Sources: MSNBC, Google Maps