When affordable housing doesn’t exist

Local, Norfolk, Politics 3 Minutes

The front page of Thursday’s Pilot includes a story about Norfolk’s attempt to close down 10 unlicensed boarding houses. The 10 homes house mostly mentally ill residents referred to the operator by the Community Services Board, but also include three registered sex offenders. The homes are located throughout the city in middle and low income neighborhoods. The homes’ operator agreed to a consent order on Friday, which essentially shuts down the operation – save two residents per home – until she gets state and local regulatory approval.

The home operator may indeed get the proper permits. But I suspect that the underlying reasons for the homes’ existence will not be explored nor will any attention be paid to the plight of the residents now that the doors are shuttered. As I see it, the biggest issue is the lack of affordable housing.

I’ve lived in Norfolk since 1978. And I’ve lived all over the city. As a poor college student, I lived in Ocean View in an apartment complex that was riddled with crime. That complex has been renovated and is now a fairly nice place to live. I also lived in Ghent in a building that ended up being condemned and was subsequently torn down. My first home was in Fairmount Park, a fragile neighborhood made more so by the reduction of affordable housing in the city.

Affordable housing communities in Norfolk have been razed and nothing has been done to replace them. Robin Hood Apartments, Lakeland, Lafayette Shores – all of these and more were affordable housing that was torn down. In the early 1980s, I was affiliated with a non-profit organization who was committed to helping the poor. Located in the area of the Robin Hood Apartments, this organization was dealing with the poor and the homeless before it was popular to do so. And I learned a lot in my years with St. Columba Ecumencial Ministries. I watched as Robin Hood was torn down and the tenants moved to the next lowest income neighborhood that they could go. Many of them ended up in Fairmount Park, often 2 or 3 families in one home. This neighborhood of post WWI-era bungalows couldn’t handle the influx. It took 20 years for the former residents of Robin Hood to get the promised housing vouchers.

What I learned back then was that many of the homeless were former mental patients, turned out of the state institutions as Virginia got out of the business of housing them. The idea was that the communities would better serve these people. Well, that was not the case then nor is it the case now, some 25 years later. As shown in the article, just where do the mentally ill live when Social Security disability benefits are less than $600 a month?

And how many other people – working people – are unable to find a place to live? As much as I would prefer mixed-income housing rather than the low-income housing projects, the reality is that just doesn’t happen. Norfolk reduces the amount of available low income housing every time it does away with one of the projects. Broad Creek is the latest major such project going on in Norfolk. Home of last year’s Homearama, the NRHA is now seeking a $20 million grant to redevelop an adjacent public housing community. The promise is mixed-income housing but I’ve seen that promise before. Try to find affordable housing in Ghent.

I understand Norfolk’s need to redevelop – and increase – its tax base. The city has no other way to do so. But we are rapidly approaching a situation whereby the people who work in the city won’t be able to afford to live here. I believe that it is past time for Norfolk to do something for the working class in the city to be able to live here. All redevelopment should have a certain percentage of the properties set aside as affordable housing. All new developments should require some inclusionary housing.

Norfolk should not become unaffordable to all but the wealthy.

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8 thoughts on “When affordable housing doesn’t exist”

  1. Once again learn from NoVa before its too late. Up here we are being forced to use tax revenue to set aside for affordable housing. So its a cache 22 we expanded our tax base but now a portion of the tax base is being used to fund affordable housing.

  2. How does it work up there? Is there a redevelopment & housing authority who handles it? Are the housing development developers required to build a certain percentage of affordable housing?

  3. Hi Vivian. What do you think would happen if a mixed-income neighborhood had certain homes that the price was suppressed and only available to buyers under a certain income level?

  4. I don’t know. Is that being done anywhere?

    My sense is that is not what inclusionary housing is about. Instead, it is about building afforable homes to start with.

  5. I just don’t know if it’s being done. I’m just thinking that if you had a neighborhood of mixed value homes, the neighborhood desirability would drive up the value of the less fancy more affordable homes, and that would end up not being inclusionary at all.

    Way back in 1971 the Carillon neighborhood in Richmond integrated (racially) relatively successfully in sharp contrast to some other neighborhoods. They had an active civic association that embraced integration rather than going off the deep end like some other neighborhoods. And they maintained their property values whereas in some other neighborhoods there was white flight and the values plummeted.

    I was just a kid but I do remember that it was a point of pride that the neighborhood was economically mixed and that was considered to be part of the success. It is not something I kept up with, but I imagine there isn’t much affordable housing there right now and that the entire neighborhood is out of the reach of any lower income buyer.

    So that’s what I was thinking about and I was just wondering if there was some way to 1) plan for that economic mixture a new housing development and 2) make sure that subsequent sales don’t have the entire neighborhood out of reach of lower income families.

    And I do realize that this doesn’t begin to address the problem of the boarding house residents, although there is no reason why they couldn’t be accommodated somehow.

  6. I don’t know how you could legally supress the selling price of homes. And I would suspect that over time, a mixed income housing neighborhood would eventually increase in value so much that the housing would be out of reach of low income homeowners.

    While home ownership is an overall goal, we have to be realistic that some people cannot afford to buy and must rent. When housing prices are so high, it doesn’t just take low income buyers out of the market. It also makes rents out of reach. Here in Norfolk, few options exist for reasonable rentals, which is why some of the fragile neighborhoods have been overrun by low income families doubling or even tripling up in single family residences. We’ve even lost some of the hotels that low income people lived in.

    Norfolk suffered white flight as well, and is trying to recover from that still. Part of the redevelopment process has been with that goal in mind. Thus the razing of low income projects, which have been replaced with high income housing. One of the projects I mentioned about – Lafayette Shores – was a privately owned low income housing area. It is now one of the more expensive neighborhoods in the city. It took the developer a long time to accomplish it – drawing people back to Norfolk is difficult – but he got it done.

    There is no simple answer to the problem. A combination of efforts – increasing wages, inclusionary housing, education – will be necessary to combat the issues. And it won’t happen overnight. But we need to address this now, before it gets any worse.

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