KUHF-88.7’s Laurie Johnson did an important story today on Mayor White’s big new program to boost “affordable housing” in the city. It seems that some of the people who are the intended beneficiaries of this grand program are pretty skeptical:
[David Mincberg] presented the plan to a community group in the Fondren/Southwest area, where the grant money will be targeted. Complexes between 10 and 35 years old are eligible. At the end of the presentation, several people brought up concerns that the initiative will not take care of the much older, dilapidated housing projects. Kerry Chambers is the president of the Cattails Homeowners Association, which is off of W. Bellfort.
“My main concern is the eyesore and the high crime. Just this past weekend it was on the news about ten people shooting out down at Sandpiper and W. Bellfort, which is right down the street from here. So if we’re going to have gangland wars, something definitely has to be done down there to come and demolish and tear these apartment units down so that those people that are concerned with safety could pass through there safely.”
Chambers says this initiative will ignore the very oldest and poorest complexes, which means they’ll degenerate even further. [Mincberg] says the city simply cannot invest grant money in those complexes because it wouldn’t be financially feasible to do so, which leaves it up to the owners to decide what to do with those properties.
“Those owners or those financial institutions are going to have to make very difficult financial decisions as to what they want to do with it. But it was our feeling that we would not be doing this neighborhood or any other neighborhood a favor by putting money into an old, dilapidated project and buying five more years of life when perhaps the best decision maybe, is that it’s obsolete.”
In other words, the program really isn’t going to have much of an impact on the worst properties in some of Houston’s worst neighborhoods — the sorts of places that breed the surging gang activity described in a good Texas Monthly feature from a few months ago, a surge that Houston’s leaders prefer to ignore.
David Mincberg, by the way, is the former Harris County Democratic Party chair and an important Friend of Bill. His wife Lainie Gordon is the marketing director for the Houston Chronicle. It’s always kind of interesting to keep track of the network of technocratic-progressive elites who are hard at work fixing problems in our city.
PREVIOUSLY: Mayor White names assistant for multifamily housing, Watching history repeat itself…, Friend of Bill no substitute for diligent oversight.
