I, also, attended the Mayor's press conference.
Judging from David Brauer's frantic posts I thought I
ought to attend. Don't want to miss those
earth-shattering events.
I only read about it at 10:45 so I was hard pressed to
get there on time. Cost me $7 to take a cab.
I don't even go to full price movies, so you can
imagine my disappoointment when it turned out to be
mostly a photo-op for the big three, The Mayor, The
City council Pres. and Joan Campbell whose ward I
think we were in but who anyway holds the purse
strings at City Hall.
I don't think "the eleventh hour plea" as MPR has
characterized it will have much effect.
The Mayor greeted me warmly and I must say she never
fails to leave me feeling beguiled.
She is a good politician and she's a tough one to
beat. She also has one of the biggest and best fog
machines in town as evidenced by todays event.
I'm really looking forward to seeing her again tonight
at her mental health dog and pony show. For those of
you who are interested, its at 7:30 pm at Plymouth
Congregational Church, just a stone's throw from
Stevens Square.
The backdrop for the conference today was inspired. It
symbolized the success of NRP. It also symbolizes the
failure of NRP if one were to look beneath the surface
and give thought to the situation we face today vis a
vis "affordable housing".
NRP spent 48.5% of its funds, roughly $82 million on
housing. The majority of that was spent for
improvement and renovation of owner-occupied single
family houses such as the Petersons.
Another decent portion of the $82 million went into
"BLIGHT" removal and demolition. I don't have exact
numbers but it would not surprise me if more was spent
on demolition than on new multi-unit rental housing in
the past decade.
So the money spent on home owners dried up money that
could be leveraged to build more apartments. This was
happening at a time when there were tax disincentives
to develop apartment housing and interest rates were
low in an unprecedented economic boom, or the very
time when it ought to have been the easiest for people
such as the Petersons to secure conventional bank
loans.
It is a known fact that NRP favors homeowners over
renters and relatively wealthier people. So while
homes are being torn down at an alarming rate, new
immigrants are flooding the city and MCDA is spending
all their money on big projects to keep funding NRP
into the next decade and NRP is spending half its
money on low interest loans to homeowners who should
have been down at the local bank, nothing was getting
built.
Because nothing was being built shortages arose
driving up housing prices, valuations and ultimately
taxes, and so now we have pretty houses with house
rich-cash poor people facing an economic recession and
a worsened municipal financial situation that may put
greater upward pressure on property taxes despite what
the legislature may be doing.
Gee. Ain't life grand.
I know this was confusing. I'm sorry. But I think my
analysis makes sense.
Now we have TIF about to dry up about the time we're
finished with our money grab and we're thinking of how
to build low cost housing.
The irony and hypocrisy of all this is that in all
likelihood the ones who screamed loudest about costly
and wasteful downtown developments as corporate
welfare and pushed for NRP from the neighborhood level
sucked the breast of NRP for the past decade and would
never think to call that welfare.
This is in no way meant to be a full and complete
review of NRP but it is more specific than my last
post on the subject. It's something to think about
anyway.
Tim Connolly
Ward 7
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