Ashland's affordable housing issue is priority
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After reading Jeff Golden's thoughtful and provocative editorial of April 19 ("How much do we care about affordable housing?"), I felt moved to respond.
Affordable housing, workforce housing (or whatever you want to call it), is one of Ashland's most serious challenges. When the people who work here can't afford to live here, they are not connected to the community. Their children don't go to school here. They don't meet each other on the street or in the Co-op. They're not motivated to volunteer and they're not involved in the human infrastructure.
As we move further toward gentrification, we move away from the kind of vibrant, diverse community that draws people to Ashland in the first place.
Other cities, Aspen or Palo Alto for example, have awakened to these conditions and started to develop affordable/workforce housing. But, in effect it's been too little too late. Ashland is further constrained by state laws that prevent us from exploring real estate transfer fees or inclusionary zoning — both of which have been used to great advantage elsewhere.
But Ashland does have some advantages: enough civic concern to create the position of Housing Specialist in the Community Development Department, enough dedicated volunteers to comprise a Housing Commission despite periodic burn-out, and a track record of some 62 units of affordable housing since 2004, with 55 units in the pipeline. Not nearly enough to solve the problem, but better than a lot of other similarly challenged communities.
Despite the astronomical cost of land, Ashland also has another advantage: the opportunity to use some city-owned land, either for the construction of affordable housing or to sell and develop the housing elsewhere. There's not a lot of it, but more than you'd think. For example, there are city yards spread throughout Ashland that should be consolidated, possibly freeing up property here and there. Although a proposal for housing over a small parking lot downtown was unsuccessful, there are other larger parking lots that might be more amenable to air-rights development.
In addition, the Ashland School District has land that could be used for housing teachers and staff.
SOU also has land that could be dedicated to faculty housing, and the university has initiated a program to address this situation.
The Housing Commission is in the final process of developing a Housing Trust Fund, and will be looking for funding streams, both public and private.
You might ask, "How can we afford to fund affordable housing in this economy?" The answer is with publicly owned land, state and federal grants, assistance of nonprofit organizations and private donations. Fundamentally, that question poses another. Can we afford not to?
Can our hospital remain viable on mostly Medicare and Medicaid patients? Will we have to close newly renovated schools? Do we really want to become a retirement community? I don't think so.
Jeff Golden finishes his column with what he calls the "inelegant question what's in it for the rest of us?"
What's in it is the survival of the thriving, diverse, multi-generational community that we all like to think of as Ashland.
