Piling On

It’s almost as bad as congressional earmarks. Monday night, at the public hearing on CB 29, the usual suspects lined up to demand that any village center redevelopment include affordable housing if redevelopment plans include a residential component.

Under the banner of “full spectrum of housing” the housing activists want any new residential component to set aside 30% of the units for affordable housing. The 30% allocation would be broken down by 10% for families making between $60K and $80K annually, 10% for families making between $40K and $60K annually and 10% for families making less than $40K annually.

To be fair, these advocates recognize that some villages like Wilde Lake already have a disproportionate share of affordable housing. According to Tim Sosinski, the idea is to apply this 30% formula to those villages that have not done “their share” for affordable housing like River Hill. A developer like Kimco in Wilde Lake would be able to bypass the 30% allocation by making a contribution to a newly established “housing trust” instead.

While this is certainly a laudable effort to provide housing for those “police officers, firemen, teachers and waiters” who are currently priced out of this market, putting up additional hurdles for developers to jump through won’t help save the village centers.

I thought the whole idea of CB 29 was to actually make it easier to redevelop the ailing village centers.