Charlestown Real Estate Update

Tom Gentz rebuilding a classic Porsche,
NOT building a Habitat home

Where’s all of Tom Gentz’s affordable housing?

By Will Collette

Town Council President Tom Gentz is fronting a plan to kill the state’s affordable housing program. The plan was written by Planning Commissar Ruth Platner and largely benefits the constituents of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance.

Here’s how the Platner-Gentz Affording Housing Deconstruction Act works: figure out the price of a residential property that is affordable to somebody or some family earning 80% of the town’s average mean income. For Charlestown, the magic number is $216,273.

Then look at your property rolls and count up how many residential properties – it doesn’t matter if they are summer cottages, or mixed use or vacation homes – and see how many are assessed at less than $216,273.

If the number of properties at or below the magic number is 10% or more than the number of residences in your town, then CONGRATULATIONS! You have met the state standard for having sufficient affordable housing to meet the needs of your community.

Now, Progressive Charlestown discovered that neither Tom Gentz nor Ruth Platner had actually counted the number of properties that would be magically transformed into affordable housing under their plan. We know this because we did count, and when my colleague Tom Ferrio told them, at a recent Planning Commission, the number was over 900, Gentz almost wet himself for joy and Platner kind of harrumped and said that was good to know.

Yep, there are more than 900 Charlestown properties assessed at less than $216,273. Thus, under the Platner-Gentz Affordable Housing Deconstruction Act, Charlestown would need to do NOTHING. Nada. Zilch. We need do nothing for the needs of future Charlestown residents and we need to do nothing for those people who live in the 900+ properties.

But does Charlestown really have adequate affordable housing? If you ask the sons and daughters of Charlestown’s families who want to get married and start a family and live in Charlestown, the answer is no. If you ask many town employees and volunteer firefighters who would like to live in town, the answer is no. If you ask older people who want to retire and downsize to an affordable home in Charlestown, the answer is no.

If you look in the real estate listings, the answer is also no.

Charlestown' only almost affordable rental -
on the market for $950 a month for this trailer

I checked Zillow.com just a couple of days ago and found there are exactly two rental properties on the market in Charlestown. One is a trailer home and the monthly rent is $950. The other is a house on Narrow Lane and the monthly rent is $1,995.

I checked RealtyTrac.com, the best site to follow distressed properties. RealtyTrac is showing 112 properties up for sale. Of those 112 properties, only 19 are priced at less than $216,273 and nearly all of them are condos or trailers.

There are an additional 12 bank-owned properties. Of those 12, 10 are priced at less than $216,273.

For sale: bank-owned, $164, 900

Charlestown needed affordable rental properties. Even when the rare sale of a property priced at less than $216,000 comes up, it is difficult for people with 80% of median income or less to buy them. Before the housing crash, anyone who was still breathing could get a loan, regardless of income, down-payment or collateral.

Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Lenders are not lending and when they are, they want high down payments, good steady income and a terrific credit score. These are all hard to come by.

Sellers know this too. Homeowners who want to sell find they can’t get their price, and even when they chop the price as far as they can, the properties still just sit there for lack of qualified buyers. But note, like most things, the normal rules don't apply to the multi-million properties. Those sales are doing fine.

Though the Platner-Gentz Affordable Housing Deconstruction Act is a peachy idea for the 1% who lead the CCA, it will further stagnant the Charlestown housing market. A stagnant market stunts housing prices – after all, you have to sell sometime, and if the property won’t move, you’re going to cut the price some more.

As these prices drop, so do our property values. Then our tax base shrinks, forcing the tax rate to up.

And the Platner-Gentz scheme’s catastrophic effects are not limited to Charlestown (even though that’s all they care about). Every city and town in Rhode Island can do the same arithmetic as Charlestown – just count up your properties that are assessed belong the threshold – and they will also find they are at or above 10% affordability.

And that’s the harsh reality that make the Platner-Gentz proposal unlikely to even get a hearing, never mind being enacted.

While the CCA does a victory lap after their success at the November Town Council meeting in getting three anti-affordable housing members added to the town’s Affordable Housing Commission, in the end, what good have they done for anyone? Except their own selfish few, of course.