Comments on: Affordable housing in Hampton Roads

By: Don

Don — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:02:29 +0000

Cities don’t zone for town homes because they don’t make any money from small homes. The city has to provide a water and sewage to each home. The cost of that construction and service is not covered by the taxes collected on low income housing. The cities want big homes for big tax revenues.

By: Silence Dogood

Silence Dogood — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:50:01 +0000

There’s a simple lesson to learn from our nation’s current economic woes: leadership matters. You can be proactive about addressing a developing problem before it gets out of hand–like rising energy prices–or you can ignore the problem until it develops into a large enough crisis to destroy the status quo. Either way, the problems get solved, the only question is whether or not it’s going to take a recession to implement a solution.

I agree that government is part of the problem viz. zoning laws, but developers don’t want to make less profit off low-income housing projects than they think they would make building 100 more luxury condos. And the inescapable truth of our community is that we need housing for the folks who wash plates in our restaurants’ dish pits just as badly as we need housing for the folks in the dining room paying for dinner with their disposable income. I hope we see some leadership out of our local government before a local housing shortage develops into a local housing crisis.

By: Anon E. Mouse

Anon E. Mouse — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:36:12 +0000

The first question is whether the property destruction issue is fact or fiction. Landlords are businessmen. If there is clear and convincing evidence that Section 8 renters are no more likely to damage property, landlords will change their behavior. If Section 8 renters are more likely to damage property, then the landlords should be compensated accordingly.

Another issue is, of course, zoning laws. There are restrictions on how many unrelated people can live in a house (and how close those relations must be to be considered “related”). So a retired couple who own a house cannot (legally) rent an apartment and rent out their house to two or three low-income families. Nor can a landlord buy it from the couple and rent it to two or three low-income families.

The government is the problem here. One cannot expect them to be able to solve it.