Long on research, short on solutions

Affordable housing plan needs comprehensive approach

Posted

Affordable housing. As an architect, hotelier, public servant, college professor and more, it’s a subject that has always fascinated me.

When the editor of this newspaper learned of my long-standing concerns regarding the shrinking availability of affordable shelter hereabouts, he asked that I review a document submitted by our Affordable Housing & Homeless Task Force. “Right up my alley,” I mused–and spent the better part of Sunday rifling through its pages and composing what herein follows.

Little did he know, I was once the owner of a single-room-occupancy hotel, built as the “National” in downtown Earlville, IL, population 1,400. Glass-fronted ground floor commercial spaces stretched round the corner and down the block, most of them vacant when I bought. A prominent entryway with broad stairway led up to the second floor, home to a bevy of single rooms, toilet and shower. Each room sported a small sink with mirror above and a single streetside window with a rope ladder, meant to provide exit in case of fire. Yikes! Well, to the rear of the second floor was a shared kitchen and dining facilities, along with a fire escape leading to the backyard.

I loved the place and, when I heard natives referring to it as “The Heartbreak,” I painted a large broken heart inside the entryway glass. It cost sixty bucks a month to live there, truly affordable shelter! Fast-forward to the present day and PT’s struggle to provide same.

Having conducted a fairly comprehensive study of homelessness in our community, the Affordable Housing & Homeless Housing Task Force has released a “Homeless Crisis Response and Housing Five Year Plan for Jefferson County” that well-describes the crisis at hand yet fails to come up with a broadly-based plan of attack. It is long in terms of reportage yet tragically short in terms of imaginative action.

This, I’ve come to understand, is par for the course, for we’ve been here before, when small-scale apartment blocks and small-scale accessory dwelling units (ADUs) were allowed on single home sites. Sans price controls, rents in both cases have soared and, thanks to the internet, home and apartment owners can make a bundle.

Among other affordable havens, the Admiralty Apartments have served for years as a haven for the needy; they still do so, though folks worry it could “go market” soon. This, thankfully, is not the case amongst a plethora of other options for those in need. These are well-described in the document referred to above. Yet the future looks grim unless a more comprehensive and imaginative approach to solving the problem of homelessness is promulgated.

This is not to include the Cherry Street boondoggle. For this fiasco we must blame a headstrong city manager and a majority of City Council members who rushed, with thinking caps awry, with little in the way of imagination and forethought, into a super-duper fiasco brought on by a foolhardy David Timmons.

Bob Gray was a lone dissenter. Good for him.

Though the building was offered free-of-cost, it would take $125,000 to ship it across the Strait and a great deal more to raise it up to accommodate four new rental units below.

Did you know? The city-owned property upon which the building now sits carried an assessed valuation of $600,000. Instead of pocketing $600,000-or-so from a sale, most council members chose, thinking caps awry, to throw caution to the wind on a scheme that will surely prove untenable.

Looking back think for a minute or two. The vacant land might have been sold to finance a plethora of affordable experiments in and around the city—this, the subject of another time, another day.

Todd Wexman
Port Townsend

(A graduate of the Yale School of Art & Architecture, Todd Wexman has worked as an architect/planner, a writer, builder and a teacher of urban studies, among other subjects. He has lived in Port Townsend for the last 15 years.)