Affordable Housing on the Eastern Shore has been a hot topic for years – more words expended than housing units built. The 2006 Lagniappe feature, “Forgotten Fairhope,” described the need and lack of progress, but ended on an optimistic note. Housing was about to happen and it’s happening now.
Not to worry if you can’t recall the feature (but I worry that my deathless prose in reality has only the lifespan of a mayfly), it was all prologue. The action update is right here today – the strategies and tactics described and results scored.
Let’s start earlier this year with Round One in Fairhope: Happy to report that the Ecumenical Ministries led by Reverend Whitfield won their match in the Fairhope City Council chambers. The plans for a multi-unit Affordable Housing complex just south of Fairhope were submitted to the council. After hearing public complaints and the ritual invocation of flooding and endless traffic jams if allowed, the council went ahead and approved the project. This was a milestone event – the Big Win. As a council member noted, this was first time ever that an Affordable Housing project had been approved.
It helped that the planned project was professionally presented and covered the hot-button issues like applicant screening and criminal background checks, on-site management and crime prevention (as well as flooding and traffic). The proponents also did a great job addressing some special threats to projects like this one.
The first is the public’s demand any such housing be built somewhere else. This is a demand so common it has earned its own acronym: NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The second demand is that the project be privately funded – no contribution from the city or county and no chance for it to become a financial burden on the local governments.
Both are tough to overcome, but by buying a piece of property in a part of Baldwin County that rejected establishment of a planning district, the obstacle of getting a zoning change (with lots of opportunities for rejection) was bypassed.
NIMBY came up but had no legitimacy in the discussion as pretty much anything short of a nuclear-waste dump could go into that backyard. Funding, the second potential project killer, was pretty much taken care of by the federal incentives provided to Gulf States for hurricane recovery. The project is a perfectly legitimate use of these earmarked funds and has the added benefit of a funding source so far away it is looked upon as “Other people’s money.”
Another factor in the success was growing support for Affordable Housing. It is becoming, or perhaps has become, a sentimental favorite. The need for safe, comfortable, low-cost residences in the coastal areas of south Baldwin County is widely recognized, if not welcomed. Families want it, employers want it, community leaders call for it. Affordable Housing is a social and economic good people generally feel should happen – especially if it doesn’t cause many people too much pain.
Mark your card: Affordable Housing (and the whole community) won the first round in 2007.
More recently and slightly further north, Round Two of the Affordable Housing contest took place. In early March, the Daphne City Council considered an affordable housing project for their community. The nature of this project was different from that in Fairhope. While lower-income individuals and families were the focus of the Fairhope project, in Daphne, residency would be restricted to lower-income seniors. Further, again unlike in Fairhope, this project was to be located in the middle of an established neighborhood – Park City.
This once independent community – which, I was told, pre-dates the establishment of the City of Daphne – is made up almost exclusively of single-family residences, with the majority of them owner-occupied. The residents are predominately African-American and many of the families have lived in Park City for a century or more.
Those who attended the council meeting were quick to speak of the character and cohesiveness of their special part of Daphne – and their determination to keep it that way. There message was clear: “We do not want higher density development period – no matter for what.”
Almost without exception the Park City residents recognized the value of the project in helping lower-income, elderly residents. But also almost without exception, they rejected the multi-resident units. Some suggested that they would support the project if it were made up of single family residences.
The proponents were the same as in Fairhope and they presented about the same compelling arguments in favor of building Affordable Housing. But his time the real confrontation was not over traffic or flooding or really even NIMBY. It was over a design that failed to recognize the nature of the place where it was to be built.
And this flaw proved fatal. After listening to the Park City residents, the council unanimously disapproved the request. But there was good news here too: All council members endorsed the nature of the project. They supported finding a new, less controversial location to build on.
Council member Gus Palumbo went further; he promised to help the Ecumenical Ministries find a new location and to support building Affordable Housing on that site. When it was all over, the voting ended just as in Fairhope, with vigorous applause – for a very different, but equally popular outcome.
And the Affordable Housing scorecard: One win in Fairhope. One loss in Daphne – with the promise of a rematch. But maybe most important, a well-deserved big win for Park City. Not a bad early record – especially when the preservation of a traditional neighborhood was accomplished by losing.
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
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