Posts about HUD

Unlike other states, Virginia does not allow its cities to mandate that developers replace every unit of affordable housing lost to redevelopment, or to require a fixed percentage of affordable units. But affordable housing is a priority for Alexandria, so the City Council and Planning Commission are working together with staff, developers, and residents to find innovative ways to provide it.

Over the course of the next year, the City Council should adopt a new Affordable Housing Master plan. We just completed a plan for senior services that specifically called for new, affordable retirement living options. Soon our public housing authority should complete its own master plan. And the city should finish work on the Beauregard small area plan. All of these will have a significant impact on the future of affordability in Alexandria.

The Beauregard planning study demonstrates the limits of our power. Without a new plan, current rentals, which are barely affordable to people earning under $50,000, would become luxury rentals or townhouses. Thousands of currently affordable units would vanish. The city may be able to gain a small number of units out of these conversions, but it would be limited. We can do better.

The proposed Beauregard plan saves about 700 units of affordable housing. The Council has asked that this number be raised and that we find a way to provide housing to a broader range of incomes, especially those earning under $40,000 per year.

To maximize the number of units saved, the city will need to create a more flexible approach to housing. We need to increase the contributions from developers and use those funds to preserve existing units whenever we can because it is often much less expensive to preserve an existing housing unit than to build a new one. This helps us spread the value further.

We need to ensure that the structure of developer contributions makes it easy to combine with private and non-profit money to build new mixed-income projects over the 30 years it will take for the Beauregard plan to get fully built. Over that time, over $90 million in payments could go towards affordable housing. The scale those funds creates an opportunity to attract other investment.

We need better incentives for developers to create and preserve affordable housing and mixed-use development. The city should look at every new development as a chance to add affordable housing.

Alexandria should update its home ownership and rental assistance programs, to bring them up to date with national best practices. The city should revisit its zoning to allow "granny flats," so that families can rent out affordable spaces in their home and give seniors and others living options. The city should also encourage housing on top of retail strips.

The master plan won't solve all of these issues. There isn't a silver bullet, and no one jurisdiction can solve this problem on its own. Alexandria also needs help from regional partners to build more rental housing. The federal government should also step up. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has been too silent on our national rental housing problems for too long.

Alexandria's problems are not unique. Rental rates are consuming more of people's monthly income than can be sustained all over the country. But hopefully, Alexandria's work in the coming months can provide a model for our region and state to follow.

For a neighborhood that has been the recipient of two of the Obama Administration's most celebrated community development efforts, there's been little fanfare in the city outside this small patch of Ward 7. Fortunately, that's not holding the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) back.

DCPNI is a new 501(c)3 organization led by Irasema Salcido, founder and CEO of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which has a Parkside campus. DCPNI organized a permanent Board of Directors in October 2011 and has been working since to pursue its goals for 2012. A January 2012 report by the Urban Institute outlines in great detail how DCPNI plans to transform the neighborhood.

Kenilworth-Parkside sits squeezed between the Anacostia River and DC-295 to the east and west, and a sprawling decommissioned Pepco plant and the District border to its north and south. The disadvantageous geography and years of disinvestment left Kenilworth-Parkside sinking further and further into disrepair.

Despite having Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and its acres of green space in the neighborhood, Kenilworth-Parkside still shows all of the typical indicators of urban blight.

Statistics on the residents in the DCPNI footprint are dire. Median household incomes are barely half of the city's median. Rates of teenage births are some of the highest in the nation. Single females head 90% of families.

Yet, at least until now, it's lacked any kind of investment which many of DC's now "up-and-coming" neighborhoods have received.

Enter DCPNI. In 2008, Salcido launched the Initiative based on the principles of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. DCPNI launched their efforts after winning funding from the US Department of Education.

The 2012 plan is ambitious. DCPNI is proposing home visits to pregnant women and mothers of young children. They want to build a community library of children's books. For the neighborhood's school children, they will launching an experiential learning program to visits to local museums and monuments with directed classroom instruction.

DCPNI, which holds tours of the neighborhood on the fourth Thursday of every month, is perhaps the city's foremost example of a place-making initiative. They are taking all of the most current research on comprehensive, services-based community development and applying it to one unique geographic area.

DC should keep its eye on Kenilworth-Parkside. Stakeholders of the Choice planning grant will inevitably apply for implementation funding when it becomes available in an effort to revitalize more than 300 units of dilapidated public housing. In June, Educare, a brand-new early childhood education center serving 175 Headstart-eligible children, will open its doors.

Victory Square, a new senior affordable apartment building built by Victory Housing, began accepting applications this week and will open in the spring. And all the while, DCPNI continues to establish partnerships with local businesses and organizations and organize programs that aim to strike at the core of Kenilworth-Parkside's ills in just the way that Canada tackled a swath of Harlem.

Over the next few years, as the 21 Promise Neighborhoods get to work across the country, community development advocates will learn whether or not federal money can be applied to local community development initiatives successfully and efficiently to improve public health, housing and education outcomes.

Lucky for the DC region, there's a site right in our backyard to follow, support, and learn more about. You just have to know where to look.

Anacostia was selected as one of 5 capital city communities across the country to participate in Greening America's Capitals, a project between the Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and US Department of Transportation.

The program will "produce schematic designs and exciting illustrations intended to catalyze or complement a larger planning process for the pilot neighborhood."

The station is "badly in need of attention," according to Harriet Tregoning, Director of the DC Office of Planning, who reiterated that improvements would "complement other [ongoing] projects" in the neighborhood. The station lacks a distinctive character and, although, within short walking distance of the Anacostia River, there are no direct access paths to the waterfront.

To improve pedestrian safety, residents suggested footbridges, wayfinding signage, refuge medians, speed humps, and better street lighting. A slide presentation contrasted the present condition of Howard Road, Firth Sterling Avenue, and the 5-point intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue, Howard Road, and Sheridan Road with renderings that envisioned what the future could look like.

James Magruder, a native of Ward 8 who works with Washington Parks and People, agreed that the intersection of Howard Road and Firth Sterling was in dire need of attention. "Over the years that corner has been the site of many accidents that have been fatal" to pedestrians, said Magruder.

Another way to improve safety in the area is to develop some of the many vacant properties around the station. WMATA owns one large vacant field on the other side of Howard Road, and both the Williams and Fenty administrations pushed to relocate WMATA's headquarters here, though without success.

Brenda Richardson, who works for Councilmember Marion Barry, claimed that WMATA has been unresponsive to their inquiries about the station area. In response, an official from WMATA who had been sitting in the back of the room said Metro is conducting an "initial evaluation to determine what the issues are" around safety.

Some east of the river denizens were skeptical that the studies would lead to change. "We're studied out," said one resident who attends similar meetings weekly. "Everyone's studying us to get money. Then the plans get sat on for 20 years."

"The worse case scenario is this doesn't happen," an EPA official admitted. "This only happens if all parties agree."

The center of Langley Park is at New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard. It straddles the border between Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, and is known for being a very diverse, but lower-income community.

The planners, one of whom is an asset manager at a Bethesda-based nonprofit housing developer, explained that the need for public housing assistance arises from the fact that so many workers aren't paid enough to be able to afford market-rate housing. This is especially severe in high-cost areas like metropolitan Washington.

An often-overlooked remedy to the underlying problem is to increase the minimum wage across the board so that working people can live off of their income without needing other assistance. But this has not been the chosen approach, for the most part, in the United States.

A historical perspective

The first federal housing programs grew out of the Great Depression and the need to house the thousands that the economic crash left on the street. In later years, these programs focused on replacing "slums"—many of which were thriving, though poor, neighborhoods.

The resulting development often took the form of high-density apartment buildings in non-urban configurations. Construction of much of the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is the result of this urban renewal planning.

Public housing was not intended to house families indefinitely, but rather to support them to get back on their feet. The programs that eventually came to be overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were intended not only to house people, but to sustain the economy by encouraging bank lending and to support the housing industry.

In the 1970s, HUD moved from being a financier for the development of traditional public housing projects to using Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 to create an alternative approach. This new approach took the form of vouchers for private housing.

Policy tools

Section 8 payments are made to landlords on behalf of individuals in need of housing who meet legal residency and income requirements. They may only act as a subsidy to keep prices or rents low, or they may cover most or all of the cost of rent or a mortgage. Generally, income tests mean that households must make no more than a certain percentage of the average median income for their metropolitan area.

Disappointingly, the process for qualifying for a Section 8 voucher has become long and tedious. Over 20,000 District residents currently sit on the waiting list, representing a casework backup of two years or more.

Only 7,000 people nationwide receive vouchers each year. As this 12-minute documentary from the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition illustrates, wait-listed people without stable homes face much greater challenges finding work, healthcare, childcare and other necessities, while many who have gotten vouchers have become productive members of their communities.

Governments also offer tax credits to nonprofit developers of affordable housing. This amounts to a dollar-for-dollar reduction in the developer's tax bill, up to an annual limit of 90% of development costs for ten years.

Nonprofits—which don't pay corporate income taxes anyway—sell these credits to banks, which then give 70 cents for each dollar of tax credit the bank can apply to its own tax bill back to the nonprofit. This helps banks comply with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

More recently, state and local governments (with some HUD assistance) have worked to include minimum affordable housing set-asides in new mixed developments. Hope VI, established in the early 1990s, aimed to replace the most derelict traditional public housing with mixed-use communities. But of the nearly 70,000 public housing residents displaced under Hope VI, only 24% were able to return into the units that replaced their original homes.

Another tool local governments use is inclusionary zoning (IZ): a zoning requirement that a certain percentage of units in developments of certain sizes must be reserved for those of lesser means. In Montgomery County, this means Moderately Priced Dwelling Units (MPDUs). Montgomery had one of the country's first inclusionary zoning ordinances. It was adopted in 1974.

Developers are generally offered enhanced incentives in exchange for their acceptance of IZ. Montgomery County has set a standard for IZ policies [PDF page 19]. A new Montgomery County policy mandates that greater percentages of units within one of the county's nine Metro Station Policy Areas be made affordable than in other parts of the county.

The District enacted an inclusionary zoning policy about two years ago. Unfortunately, however, Prince George's County lacks many of the policy tools that could help the residents of Langley Park stay put.

The sustained level of citizen involvement in the effort to preserve Langley Park's cultural identity while supporting transit improvement and smarter development is encouraging. It should serve as a model for other cases where low-income communities can be disadvantaged by the types of changes that will inevitably increase in our region.

If you support the Fair Purple Line Campaign's goals and want to see it succeed, please learn more about the Campaign.