Daily Kos: Affordable Housing coming to my neighborhood

I live in a nice neighborhood. My rather expensive townhouse backs up to a protected stream that (eventually) feeds into the Chesapeake, beyond that an expansive municipal park. My child in enrolled in the best school system in the country and his elementary school has a >95% success rate for math and reading proficiency. We live far enough from the beltway that we can't hear it, but close enough to jump on within a three minute ride. The DC METRO and a revitalized town center are less than a mile away and includes a newly built library, district court and the county government.

Across the road is a complex of rent to own low rise (3-story) apartments, big enough to warrant it's own bus route, which our small town home community shares. It's been owned by a holding company somewhere in Illinois and is populated by service workers, NIH postdoctoral fellows, community college students, immigrants (which overlap with all categories) and ?the working poor that care about good schools. The apartments are old, think 1970s and don't have enough parking for modern times, so there's lots of street parking.

Apparently, the complex was put up for sale in April and the City's Housing Enterprise, County?s Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the Housing Opportunity Commission may exercise the Right of First Refusal to purchase the property and convert it to mixed use with affordable housing options. The irony of this is that the city council as now constituted was elected mainly due to the then candidates opposition to another affordable income development, something which they seem to have little compunction about now.

There are those in our community that are concerned that an influx of subsidized families will crater the property value of our townhouses, bring increased crime, noise, traffic into an otherwise quiet neighborhood.

Personally, I am most concerned about the elementary school. Currently, it is operating at 140% of capacity and my child's class is at the legal limit of 27, in a relocatable. I suspect at least another bus load of kids from the complex because in our area affordable housing subsidy seems highly weighted towards families with young children. I suspect this increase will also mean more free and reduced meals, special education, English for speakers of other languages program expenditures that may further burden a school already dealing with cut backs.

Now I fancy myself a "we're all in this together" kind of person. I support the idea of affordable housing, and the mixed income levels proposed by a new urbanism, and the needs of at risk children to have access to quality schools. We've lived beside affordable housing families in this area before (but elsewhere) and they were good kids and people. Some of my child's friends at school are from affordable housing families elsewhere in town and I myself would have qualified for such, if there was something like it in rural New england in the 1970's.

Yet I would be lying if I cavalierly said that I didn't have lingering concerns about all the societal challenges that come with poverty landing on my doorstep.

There is a City Council Meeting on Monday, I will be scheduled to talk, the Council knows me quite well, and my position will be televised on the local cable channel, yet I am not sure what I am going to say.

Any thoughts?

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/22/1135328/-Affordable-Housing-coming-to-my-neighborhood

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