Quote:
Originally posted by baltassoc
It's interesting you mention this. Recently one of the local mixed-income high density developments in this area, which would have provided a significant number of housing units (mostly apartments) to lower income families was severely curbed due to massive lobbying efforts by residents in the general vicinity on the basis that it would unfairly harm the value of their homes. According to the main opponent of the development at the recent planning board hearing, his concern was that he had paid top dollar for a home on a five acre lot with the belief that everything else in the area would be on similar lots, and it wasn't fair that all these other people wanted to live nearby (nevermind that there was no zoning probihition on such density building, or any other legal or reasonable basis to believe that such incredibly lower densities would be kept in one of hte fastest growing counties in the country).
All the developers want to do is build a profitable, sustainable center. But instead the government is requiring that they lower density, due to intense pressure from the NIMBYs. Needless to say, it is the highest density, lowest profit low-income housing that is being axed.
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In their defense though, one of the only defenses a neighborhood has against the current section 8 disaster, is zoning restrictions to inhibit development of multi-unit buildings. Because once the building is there, the owner only has to okay a section 8 voucher once before disaster threatens to strike the neighborhood.
In some neighborhoods (outlying) of Chicago, residents are savvy enough to protest any plan for any new multi-unit. I'd bet a bazillion dollars that the people in your example would find less reason to protest if they were promised that the new building would not subsidize the rent of any portion of the population beyond the national average (or something close). But if I thought a 10 unit building even 2 blocks away was going section 8, my place might be one of the first up on the market.
And for every Club hiding from his new neighbors in his compound with guard dogs and machine guns, there's a Hello who will take one for the team and take the new neighbor's kids out for ice cream every once in awhile. Heck, someone or other here might even consider volunteering to be the immediate neighbor of the local section 8 recipient as charity. I'd take that chance, so long as I wasn't expected to have them as all my neighbors.
