We could dream up better articles to read. In one, a reporter revisits eminent domain for private gain in New Jersey, the other article talks about all the little people feeling the squeeze for home buying....so here it is class warfare, economic segregation, progress,"workforce housing".... all the good stuff.....
Monica Yant Kinney | No public good has come from 'cleansing' the Mart
By Monica Yant Kinney
Inquirer Columnist
I almost let this one slide, thinking I had run out of ways to slam the raw deal down at the Pennsauken Mart.
But then I drove by the demolition site and started imagining the apartment complex that will rise from the rubble.
Yes, an apartment complex.
In the end, Camden County officials ruined the lives and livelihoods of 100 mom-and-pop merchants to build a freaking apartment complex.
They have the nerve to call it Renaissance Walk.
And they prefer you think of it in more luxurious terms, as "an upscale rental community with outstanding amenities designed to attract young professionals" who will be thrilled to pay $2,000 a month to live next to not one but two highways in Pennsauken.
So much for government's seizing private property only when necessary to serve "the public good," like building a school or a road.
Renaissance Walk will boast an indoor-outdoor pool. Sounds inviting, but if the masses can't splash, how is it for the public good
....."Sometimes, things don't necessarily go as planned," explained the Camden County Improvement Authority's executive director, Jeffrey Schwartz.
"We feel this brand-new upscale community represents the highest and best use for the site."
He might, but do the ends justify the means when the Mart merchants were guilty of nothing more than selling bargains to people who count their change?
An eminent-domain opponent I know calls the practice "economic ethnic cleansing." I thought that was harsh, until Camden County officials used their power to rid Pennsauken of so-called undesirables.
Dana Berliner, a lawyer at the libertarian Institute for Justice, said eminent-domain projects were often rooted in snobbery.
"Every town wants upscale professionals, upscale retail, upscale lifestyle centers," she said.
"Of course they took a flea market. They don't want poor people, and they don't want businesses that serve poor people."
The poor paid their taxes, but "upscale professionals" will pay more.
Squeezed out of a house
By Alan J. Heavens
Inquirer Real Estate Writer
For just about all but people in the top income brackets, there is a crisis of housing affordability in the United States, observers say.
Middle-income American service workers, especially those earning between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, have suffered the most, said William Hudnut 3d, an Urban Land Institute fellow and ex-mayor of Indianapolis.
"Workforce housing is a touchy topic that generates a lot of talk but not a lot of attention - except that it should be built somewhere else," Hudnut said.
Workers in need of such housing are often referred to as "those people." But that's an unfair categorization, Hudnut said, because they are providers of critical services - dental assistants, auto mechanics, schoolteachers, police and firefighters - "the backbone of our economy who are getting squeezed by the housing-jobs imbalance that permeates our country."
In many cities, there is no affordable housing close to employment centers, which forces people to live far from where they work. "Those of us in land use know that the disconnect is a real problem, with major social, economic and environmental implications," he said.
Demand for less expensive housing can work two ways, said Bob Hay, a real estate broker in the Poconos who is to become president of the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors in January.
...."There are 20,000 people in Monroe County who commute to jobs in those areas every day, leaving at 4:30 a.m. and getting home at 9 to 10 at night," he said.
So many buyers, coupled with higher development costs, created major problems. "School districts can't find teachers who are able to afford to live in those districts," Hay said. "One regional police department expanded its rules on [how far] an officer can live from headquarters to 40 miles from 10, which is hard to imagine."
Although a lot of commuters are willing to live farther out in the suburbs, Hudnut said, "they don't factor in the cost of that commute . . . as a rising expense."
"This suggests a lingering gap between perception and reality," he said. "These moderate-income workers probably don't know that desirable affordable housing close to jobs is an option. It can be developed close to jobs in a way that can provide a high quality of life in proximity to amenities and work.
"Far-flung suburban living is not sustainable"....Many local community-development corporations take what Hudnut called a mixed-income approach to developing affordable housing, as well as adding value to sites with little value.
For example, Mount Airy USA has developed 11 townhouses on an East Montana Street lot that was vacant for 30 years - as well as Winston Commons, condos and commercial space in a historic building on nearby Germantown Avenue, and commercial buildings a few hundred yards away.
When D.L. Wormley was associate treasurer of the University of Pennsylvania a decade ago, then-president Judith Rodin wanted to try to stabilize the surrounding neighborhood.
"The university took a comprehensive approach - employment to get people to work at the university and its hospitals, creating a neighborhood school, and taking advantage of a mortgage-assistance program for full-time Penn employees that already was in place but wasn't being used very much," said Wormley, now director of initiatives at the nonprofit NeighborhoodsNow.
"We enhanced the mortgage program for employees, hospital and university, full-time staff, of all income levels," she said. "We went from having 100 to 200 houses on the market on any given day, and on the market for years, to almost nothing available."
...NeighborhoodsNow encourages people to join with community organizations and others to decide what would make a neighborhood better, "starting with beautification, since that will increase the willingness of neighbors to invest in their houses," Wormley said.
...The institute also will work to make inclusionary zoning - requirements that affordable housing be part of planning ordinances - mandatory everywhere...."A truly sustainable community is one that provides housing choices."
SAC Note: truly sustainable housing and diversity isn't 1 bedroom condos that are "affordable" at $320,000--- see the Inquirer's chart at the end of the Squeezed article ----we have provided an excerpt:
Priced Out of Ownership
Most working people earning between $20,000
and $50,000 in metropolitan Philadelphia can't afford
to buy a median-price* house here ($294,000 in third-quarter 2006).
Annual median income* needed to buy: $100,715
*SOURCE: Center for Housing Policy
See:
http://www.neighborhoodsnowphila.org/
http://www.nhc.org/
http://www.nhc.org/housing/chp-index/
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