You may want to start looking for a new place to live.
If you’re not rich and you would like to continue living in your neighborhood, you have reason to worry about a recent report that ranked Denver as the second most intensely gentrifying city in the U.S.
Between 2010 and 2017, more than 100,000 people moved to Denver. But the city issued just 35,000 permits for new housing units in the same timeframe.
Many new residents arrived with college degrees and good salaries, allowing them to spend their way into existing homes and apartments, often in historically Black and Latino communities. The situation increased prices in some of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods and drove thousands of families to leave their longtime homes. Now, this pattern of gentrification and displacement will likely intensify as the COVID-19 pandemic triggers a financial crisis.
Though the solution is simple — build more housing — Mayor Michael Hancock and members of the City Council can’t handle the truth about a critical number that should be at the center of the city’s policies: How much housing does Denver need?
How many housing units would it take to get market-rate housing prices under control, put an end to displacement and provide enough deeply affordable housing to eliminate homelessness?
Would 50,000 new housing units in the next five years do the trick? 100,000 in ten years? Maybe even more?
Don’t ask your elected officials. They have no idea. In all of the city’s thousands of pages of reports and plans for the future, there are no specific goals that layout the number of housing units needed.
“We have a failure to recognize that the only way out of this problem is to have ample housing supply at all levels of affordability,” says Phyllis Resnick, executive director and chief economist of the Colorado Futures Center at Colorado State University.
But it’s no accident that the city lacks clear and measurable goals. After all, many of the city’s leaders act as if they are intoxicated. They are under the unfair and disproportionate influence of wealthy, white homeowners — the “neighborhood defenders” who do everything they can to stop the reform of outdated and racist housing policies.
To anyone with a clear mind, it is obvious that a vast amount of new housing is needed. But the inebriation of the ruling class keeps the city stammering and stumbling toward a worsening housing crisis.
It’s understandable why many elected officials fear a specific housing goal. If Denver were working toward 100,000 new units under a strict deadline, it would require fast action to tear down the legal and procedural barriers that neighborhood defenders use to stop new housing.
For example, an ambitious housing goal would require Denver to follow Oreinvegon and Minneapolis by eliminating single-family home zoning citywide. The move would allow backyard cottages, duplexes and apartment buildings in more parts of the city. Such a goal would also mean following Buffalo and San Francisco in abolishing obsolete parking requirements, which recently halted the development of a 36-unit affordable housing project in Five Points.
Determining the amount of housing needed is crucial now because expansive swaths of the city are vulnerable to displacement, according to an interactive map from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the organization that ranked Denver as one of the most intensively gentrifying cities in America. It highlights parts of Five Points, Capitol Hill, North Denver and West Denver. And if displacement goes unchecked, we already know the consequences.
Between 2012 and 2017, in nine mostly Latino neighborhoods of West Denver, the number of people with a college degree increased 66%, according to a report from the West Denver Renaissance Collective. Those making more than $100,000 increased 97%. And out of 24,000 households, 3,900 were displaced between 2015 and 2018, including 5,800 children.
When displacement happens, many residents move to more impoverished areas or crowd into homes with other families, says Resnick. These moves are costly, disrupt children’s educations, create longer commutes for parents and put people at risk of poor health outcomes, including COVID-19. Others become homeless, including families with children. (Last year, 2,124 homeless children enrolled in Denver Public Schools.)
The problem is likely to accelerate as the economic crisis triggered by COVID-19 generates thousands of foreclosures and bankrupts landlords.
“With COVID, about 40% of low- to moderate-income renters are not paying their rent,” says Jason Richardson, director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “Think about being a landlord in one of those communities. You’re looking at months or years where people won’t be able to pay their rent.”
He predicts an imminent “frenzy of gentrification and displacement.” Investors are likely to buy up distressed properties now and wait for the economy to recover. Then they could kick out existing residents, bulldoze the buildings and construct high-end housing.
The city’s disturbingly slow pace of change makes some of this frenzy inevitable. For example, after spending years developing Blueprint Denver, a plan that outlines Denver’s future for the next 20 years, the city will spend another seven to 11 years asking residents of each neighborhood to accept a moderate amount of new housing. But the broken process favors neighborhood defenders who oppose new housing at every chance.
To overcome their influence, more people in Denver — people who want to continue living here — must wake elected officials from their NIMBY-induced stupor.
“It has to come from communities,” says Resnick. And she sees glints of hope starting to shimmer through the daze of recent events.
“We have this confluence of COVID and an impending economic crisis combined with the George Floyd protests and a new conversation about racism,” she says. “We are paying attention now. I hope we don’t lose the chance to use this opportunity for change.”
If you would like the people who run this city to fix the housing crisis before you’re priced out, contact the mayor and your City Council member. Demand one number — the number of housing units Denver needs — and a timeline to achieve it.
Andy Bosselman is a freelance journalist and past editor of Streetsblog Denver. Follow him on Twitter at @andybosselman.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
"much" - Google News
August 08, 2020 at 06:03AM
https://ift.tt/31xRP3I
Bosselman: Denver doesn’t want to know how much housing it needs — and it needs a lot - The Denver Post
"much" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37eLLij
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Bosselman: Denver doesn’t want to know how much housing it needs — and it needs a lot - The Denver Post"
Post a Comment