Hi George,

In answer to your questions:

[Do you think proposed construction on Elliot Avenue] constitutes upper-income housing? How do you think the remainer of Charlottesville should be developed? What do you think should be done for low-wage workers with regard to housing?

(1) I'm told the retail price (not the construction price) of these taxpayer-subsidized houses on Elliot Ave. will start around $125,000 or $150,000 and go up from there, into the $200,000's. Let's put this into some perspective. A 30-year mortgage on a $150,000 house, with 6.5% interest and a 10% downpayment, will run you around $1,100/month (including principle, interest, taxes and insurance). A person earning a so-called "Living Wage" of $8/hour would have to work over 108 hours/week to qualify for such a mortgage. That sounds like a lot of income to me (and a lot of time away from your kids).

(2) I'm not against building more middle-income (or even upper-income) housing in the City. But I do not think it unreasonable to request (or even, as Bern Ewert has suggested, to require) that anytime a developer builds new housing in the City -- especially when that housing is being
subsidized by taxpayer funds, or is otherwise given preferential treatment by City Hall (through zoning/regulatory waivers, etc.) -- that the developer set aside a certain percentage of the new units for affordable housing. If we're ever going to truly overcome the class (not to mention racial) barriers that plague our society, we have to move away from the old model of residential development (concentrating all of the lower-income housing in areas like Garrett Square or Westhaven and all of the higher-income housing in areas like Greenbrier or Glenmore) and instead promote real, mixed-income neighborhoods.

(3) The City has identified 13 corridors where future residential/commercial development can and should be targeted. As Joan Fenton has observed, the City's Corridor Study mentions the word "affordable" with regard to only one of these corridors. I agree with Joan that we should be looking at mixing affordable housing into more of these areas, both to promote more social integration in general and to overcome the NIMBYism that inevitably results when concepts like "affordable housing" or "rental housing" get brought up in neighborhood planning charettes. If we spread the "burden" of new housing among all 13 corridors, then no one neighborhood gets more than its share of the load.

The fact is, we need to do SOMETHING to address the critical shortage of affordable housing in our community. The Democrats for Change and the Friends of Equitable & Affordable Housing have both proposed some ideas for how to do this; we hope the City Council and candidates for City Council will come up with more ideas. (One idea that everyone seems to agree on, but no one seems willing to make a priority, is to put real pressure on UVa to build more student housing on-grounds.) Anyhow, thanks for giving this issue some attention; I hope it sparks some creative dialogue on how to address this problem.

Dave Norris (electronic mail, February 5, 2002)