At the end of an emotional and somewhat contentious Affordable Housing Commission meeting this afternoon, Town Council President Tom Gentz, council liaison to the Commission and proponent of dramatic changes to the State Affordable Housing law, announced that more discussion was needed before the proposal would be brought to the Council for a vote.
Mr. Gentz's idea to make evolutionary changes to the State Affordable Housing law was announced at the October Town Council meeting with a shortage of specifics and a great deal of mystery.
Despite the lack of specifics the CCA featured it in an email to their followers as a fantastic thing being done in our town.
I expressed a wee bit of frustration at the lack of information a couple weeks later, after attending an Affordable Housing Commission meeting where I expected he could/would talk about it but neither "ould" proved true.
This Monday several documents were released and we put them in our file archive for you and published this quick analysis. The documents are both complex and confusing so I hoped there was merely some misunderstanding and that more information would make things clearer. I continue to underestimate my own silly optimism.
Today Mr. Gentz confirmed what I thought could not be true - that his objective is to count every residential property with an appraised value of under $216,273 as Affordable Housing and that those would count toward the 330-odd Affordable Housing units that the state expects Charlestown to have.
The difference is that the State currently expects those housing units to actually have a qualifying lower-income person or family living in them. With the new proposed law they could all be owned by Florida-resident millionaires and it would be just fine, we would have fulfilled our obligation toward providing affordable housing.
I received a spreadsheet today from Ken Swain, under the Open Records law, containing the appraisal value for every residential property in Charlestown. When I count how many are valued under $216,273 I get about 900 properties. That number is low because it doesn't separate out multi-family buildings.
So all is good! We need 330-something affordable housing units and we have over 900. It doesn't matter whether they are all summer cottages for people like attorneys from Boston.
Done, put it in a box, wrap it up, tie it with a bow!
In today's meeting Mr. Gentz made it clear that he doesn't care about making affordable housing work. He just wants to eliminate it.
Or maybe not. He seemed completely unfazed by comments that this would stand no chance at the Statehouse because there is strong support for working class housing. He also showed little interest in talking about providing more rental affordable housing. When presented with the position that much of what he says he wants to accomplish can be done in the town affordable housing plan, he expressed indifference, continuing to push for changes at the state level.
I can't help but think there is some sort of long game going on here that is more likely related to an election campaign plank, opposing working people, rather than being serious about efficiently providing affordable housing. Just my opinion, of course.
Disclosure: the author's wife, Suzanne Ferrio, is a member of the Affordable Housing Commission but she makes him attend the meetings if he wants any information before the meeting minutes are released. Even offering to prepare dinner while she's at the meeting doesn't change her mind. The author also had to make his own Open Records request for the documents even though they were in Suzanne's email Inbox.