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| A tulip, known as "the Viceroy", displayed in a 1637 Dutch catalog. Its bulb cost between 3000 and 4200 florins depending on size. A skilled craftsman at the time earned about 300 florins a year. (from Wikipedia) |
In the end, affordable housing was saved by the lawyer.
When Town Council President Tom Gentz opened tonight’s joint
Town Council, Affordable Housing Commission, and Planning Commission workshop
on his proposed “evolutionary adjustments” to state affordable housing law by
asking everyone to remember today’s anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
I thought, this cannot be a good sign. If someone had offered me a bet then and
there that the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor would be the day
affordable housing would die, I would have taken it.
And I would have lost.
By Linda Felaco
First, the
chairs of the two commissions offered their advisories. The Affordable
Housing Commission’s advisory was concrete, detailed, and offered positive
suggestions for innovative ways to address the town’s affordable housing needs
without building new structures, such as through a tax credit similar to the
state’s Farm, Forest, and Open Space credit, whereby income-qualified homeowners
would receive a tax credit for 10 years as long as they agreed to only sell,
rent, or lease the property to income-qualified people during that time period.
At the end of the workshop, Affordable Housing Commission chair Evelyn Smith
asked for and received the council’s approval to move forward with the plans
outlined in their advisory.
The Planning Commission’s advisory was long on what they
didn’t like (pretty much anyone building anything anywhere, natch) and full of
extraneous details such as what I’m sure is an apocryphal story of some unnamed
woman in some unnamed town who supposedly “lost her home and her health to the
threat SHAB [the State Housing Appeals Board] held over her town.”
Oh, and they still want to give people vouchers to move to Westerly.
The advisory also included an interesting précis on the causes
and effects of the recent housing bubble. Apparently, in addition to all their
other talents, the planning commissioners fancy themselves economists as well.
According to the Planning Commission, “Housing values reached their
unprecedented levels through a massive influx of foreign money, requiring U.S. bankers
to get especially creative in finding adequate targets for investing that
money.” Funny, I thought the bubble had something to do with speculators
persuading everyone that somehow, contrary to all historical evidence, home
prices could only ever go up. Oh, and the fact that housing is
largely exempt from capital gains tax may have had something to do with it. The PC then
offered the supremely confident conclusion that “For housing values to return
to the unprecedented levels before the bust, government policy makers would
have to succumb to amnesia, and set the stage for allowing it to happen again.”
Um, Earth to Planning Commission: Forgetting history is what
politicians do best. And boom-and-bust cycles have been an integral feature of
capitalism since Adam Smith. Cf. the Dutch tulip bulb bubble of the 1630s.
But much to my surprise, in the end, on the advice of Town
Solicitor Peter Ruggiero, the resolution that was proposed and passed
unanimously by all the town councilors except the absent Lisa DiBello asks only
for a moratorium of at least one year on for-profit comprehensive permits so
that local ordinances can be brought into line with the state’s Land Use 2025 plan,
which currently, only nonprofit developers of affordable housing must comply
with. No radical redefinition of affordable housing by numerical jujitsu.
So it appears that if affordable housing is to die, it will
die another day.