Reply to What to do about Affordable Housing in Arlington?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Serious question

Why do we need affordable housing at all

It just creates artificial floors, screws the middle class who make just over the income cutoff.  People don't have right to live anywhere

Is this some liberal white guilt thing?[/quote]

It may have started as a liberal white thing, but in order to obtain Federal government subsidies for many programs, the Feds are requiring that a certain percentage of housing in areas be affordable.  No affordable housing, no government tit.[/quote]

I'm all for AH. I just want it to be mixed income, so that we're not economically segregating people or sheltering one area of the county from having AH.[/quote]

Is your concern that individual buildings be mixed income, or the distribution of AH among neighborhoods?

If the former, than you should applaud things like inclusionary zoning.  The all AH buildings would be problematic - but they do deliver a lot of units relatively cheaply.  Not sure how easy it would be to get that many units in mixed income buildings.

If its neighborhoods, well it has hard to get these buildings in SFH zoned areas. More ADU's would help.   The County could buy land in places like the RB corridor for AH, but that would be expensive. [/quote]

I know it would be hard, but I think the County could do better in helping families buy housing instead of building tenements.

This place leaves me so torn - I came for a good life for my kids, but I don't think it's right to see others struggle so hard. And yet, we standby and let them all be pushed into one or two neighborhoods with no prospect of moving up. If we had more land, Arlington could help those families buy townhouses or do something like Singapore did in the 70s.[/quote]

First off, those new all AH buildings are hardly tenements.

I am not sure they are all in one or two neighborhoods.  Many are on Col Pike and Buckingham Gardens, but there is also that apt complex on Glebe near Crystal City, and I think some proposals elsewhere.  Also there are prospects to move up - the neighborhoods they are in are still mixed income, and the kids attend some pretty decent schools - I don't think they are condemned to multigenerational poverty. [/quote]

https://www.arlnow.com/2016/05/13/nauck-apartment-residents-demand-better-living-conditions/

Maybe it's not Cabrini-Green, but we can and should do better.

The economic profile of the west end of the Pike (west of Four Mile Run) has decreased significantly in recent years, and there are more proposals for this area that will push it even further into concentrated poverty territory. Would I like it if developers and retailers were not prejudiced against areas that are impoverished? You bet. But this is real life, not a fantasy. Businesses do not locate in poor neighborhoods. And mixed income developments, to balance out the affordable housing that has been built, are not as likely to materialize once a neighborhood is committed in such large quantity to poverty for 60 or more years. Concentrating poverty into a handful of schools isn't a great idea. Not for the kids who are currently living in poverty, nor for the kids who are more affluent but never even meet kids who come from less privileged circumstances. One can criticize the current system without being against AH or the residents who live in AH. Again, it may not be by design, but the county is not succeeding by their own measures in their attempt at geographic distribution. Not yet anyway. Hopefully they can do better in the future. [/quote]

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