A recommendation requiring a 10 percent affordable housing set-aside for 30-plus-units projects where no major public subsidy and significant zoning considerations apply is taking the most business heat out of the recommendations tendered in July by the Baltimore City Council?s Task Force on Inclusionary Zoning and Housing
“It?s the 10 percent [quota],” Greater Baltimore Council President Donald Fry agreed was most conspicuous. However, Fry stressed that the 500-member regional business council will have no official position in the matter until a bill is introduced.
“If the city is making a major subsidy, then there?s probably a reasonable expectation to provide some housing [for low- and middle-income families]. But if it?s strictly a rezoning or if it?s your own property, should that trigger a requirement to do the same thing?” Fry said, noting that the council was behind the proposal in principle but worried about over-taxing the city?s fledgling housing market
The 13-member task force submitted several major and minor recommendations designed to foster mixed-income neighborhoods in residential city areas that have posted home sales increases of 12.5 percent and 17.4 percent in 2005 and 2004 respectively, but show a 20.3 percent retreat as of mid-2006 ? though home prices remain stubbornly high.
The recommendations include minimum 20 percent set aside for “inclusionary homes” for projects involving major public subsidies or significant rezoning, with initial preference going to qualified dislocated or nearby residents; cost off-sets to developers or subsidies to buyers/sellers to enhance project feasibility; a transfer tax-defrayed “inclusionary housing trust fund” to assist low-income residents of project areas; and a $50 million infusion into the state Workforce Housing Grant Program.
Asked about business? concerns with the 10 percent provision, Baltimore Citizens Planning and Housing Association Executive Director Michael Sarbanes, who also was chairman of the task force, assured that the menu of proposed off-sets will totally compensate developers for their compliance.
“The decision is whether Baltimore wants to set a development framework such that anybody in the city can look at any development going up and think that there could be home in there for him or his family,” Sarbanes added.
The city council?s Land Use and Transportation Committee will hold a public hearing in the matter Oct. 4.
