There’s a bit of a fight brewing about affordable housing in the area. If you remember, the city plans to redevelop the vacant Hebrew Home building at 1125 Spring Road NW as affordable housing. There’s a community meeting tomorrow at the Raymond Rec Center at 3725 10th Street NW about it, and it looks like two camps have formed, both of which are advertising the meeting.
On one side are proponents of making the building 100% affordable. They have a Facebook group and argue that the city’s house prices are going up and despite growth, there are fewer affordable units in the city (they also quote statistics.)
On the other side are a group distributing flyers (pictured above) that say the city is “quietly pushing plans” to turn the building into 100% affordable housing, and that concentrating low income housing in one place is bad for everybody — they also include a picture of Park Morton, the troubled housing complex on Park Road, which is not related to this at all. In my opinion, that’s basically a scare tactic: this is what could happen!
While I don’t disagree that concentrating poverty is not good, this certainly isn’t some kind of nefarious secret plot by the city to sneak the plan past local residents. This is at least the second meeting about it, and the city also put out a survey to judge opinions of the community. Could they do more to advertise it? Sure, but community meetings and surveys are a good way to let people know.
The second group argues that the building should be a combination of senior, affordable and market rate housing, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the rest of the flyer.
In any case, it should be an interesting meeting.
