Stop, Drop and Roll

04 August 2008 | AUSD, Alameda City Council, Alameda Community Development Forum, redevelopment | John Knox White

It’s a week of meetings this week. Tuesday is the City Council/CIC meeting at City Hall, Wedensday is the Fernside Traffic Calming Meeting, Thursday is the SunCal/Alameda Point Meeting on the Hornet.

The CIC will be talking about the proposed Island High project. You can read the staff report here. The report makes a big mistake in forgetting that in the end the project is about people, not financing, and manages to come across sounding like the City believes that very low-income people shouldn’t own houses. It should be used in the future as an example of how not to discuss the creation of homes.

This project raises some major concerns and issues regarding how the city builds very-low, and low income housing. But first some explanation as to how the Island High project came to be.

The project site has been identified for years as a site for city created low-income housing and no matter what happens with this proposal, it is highly likely that there will be some housing of this nature there in the future. Initially, city redevelopment money was going to be used to build these homes.

Along comes the Grand Marina project, which is 40 housing units, 25% of which must be for low and very-low incomes. (10 units).

A lot of affordable housing receives Federal, state or redevelopment money to help pay the costs of providing it. In Alameda, historically, the city and developers have used State Multi-family Housing Program (MHP) funds and housing tax credits to finance the project. These funds do not allow for for-sale homes, only rentals.

Warmington Home, the builder of the Grand Marina project, is not interested in rentals, they build and sell homes…Period.

Which means that they will work with an affordable housing developer like EBALDC. This developer would create and manage the affordable units, since Warmington is not going to do so.

Affordable housing developers have found that rental complexes perform better with on-site managers, but that in order to have one (cost-effectively that is), a complex needs to have about 40 units. The same size as the Grand Marina project.

So the Grand Marina project talks to the city about suitable sites, the city has been A) looking to build affordable homes at Island High, B) they see a chance to have Warmington pay for all the units on the site and use the city’s redevelopment money somewhere else (hello Islander Hotel!) C) the project also achieves another goal, lease money for the School District, which can be used for operations. The stars might be aligning, the city sees possible benefits, though nobody has talked to anybody yet. They schedule a public meeting and the project is DOA. I’ll be very surprised if some of the first words in the oral staff report aren’t “The project has been re-scaled.”

So issues to be discussed:

Inclusionary housing funding: The goal of the city’s inclusionary housing policy is to have a range of household incomes in all neighborhoods. Not only does this create better affordable housing, it also creates better neighborhoods. The idea is that a project should create one affordable housing unit for every three market rate housing unit and that the profits from the market-rate units should pay for the “losses” on the below-market rate homes.

An example of the building to the letter, but not the spirit of the policy, at Bayport, the city allowed much of the affordable housing to be pushed into a corner and built “separately” which is not inclusionary.

By allowing the funding constraints of government assistance programs drive projects, we are setting up inclusionary housing to become both unaffordable or to be developed in such a was as to be not inclusionary. The city should be looking at this now. Before the many projects that are slowly moving forward get rolling.

Site location: Contrary to popular belief, this area of the East End has the highest concentration of low-income households in Alameda. In fact, just down the street are the only two census tracts that are considered communities of concern because of the proportion of very low income households. Is this the place to concentrate more affordable housing?

On the other hand, given the central location, proximity to transit, shops, etc., this would appear to be one of the better locations for housing, and given that there is a big planning process (north of lincoln process) in progress, the neighborhood will probably be seeing changes in the coming years.

Housing Mix: Which brings me to the question, why 100% low and very-low? Why not a mix of market rate and low/very-low housing? Wouldn’t this have helped to create a more sustainable project, one that meets the city’s inclusionary goals?

Now it may be that in order for housing units for low and very-low income households to be built, some form of assistance is absolutely necessary. The city will then need to figure out how to make it work. Or the city could find a way to manage small numbers of rental units effectively by combining the management of them with the larger city housing authority units and having developments pay for their fair share. Like I said work needs to be done. Right now, it seems that while the city itself is not financially subsidizing the cuilding of these units, it is throwing the inclusionary housing policies out the window on Grand Marina, and possible future projects in order to accommodate a shift in the location of the units. Maybe there’s an argument that if Warmington build 2 or 3 times as much affordable housing, the addition of these unit makes up for the lack of inclusion. But that is not what has been proposed. (Warmington wants credit against future projects for the additional units).

The intent seems to be coming from a good place (“build new affordable units”) but the methodology may have become too myopically focused on funding and other issues to the loss of the grander vision.