BlogWood: MT Archives

Elite downtown housing displaces working poor

Hmmm... regular folks seem to be waking up to the fact that all of the much ballyhooed housing development in and around downtown Tampa is not designed for them.

About 60 young professionals packed a small room at the Tampa Museum of Art on Thursday night to drill city and development officials about why they can't afford most of the housing planned for downtown.

Of the 27 condominium projects planned for the urban core, very few are offering units below $200,000, and many are priced at more than $1 million.

The Tampa Chamber of Commerce's Emerge Tampa, a group for young workers, held the forum to get answers and send a message that they want downtown to become vibrant with homes and nightlife, and they want to be a part of it.

First, if you earn a limited income and yearn for something better, don’t get in bed with the Chamber of Commerce. An entity which exists to further enrich businesses and the already wealthy ownership class through massively profitable development is not going to fight for affordable housing.

In fact, developers write the rules around here, and they’re not about to offer an affordable condo to the likes of you.

Developer Frank DeBose heads a Hillsborough County board intended to encourage affordable housing, but he doesn't include that type of housing at the Pinnacle Place twin condominium towers he plans downtown.

Requiring developers to include lower-priced homes could discourage them from building in Tampa, said DeBose, chairman of the county's housing finance authority.

Instead, DeBose said, incentives such as tax breaks or other taxpayer-financed subsidies would be a better way to encourage construction of affordable housing.

That pretty much sums up Tampa’s problems: the developers write and enforce the rules. Frank is happy to do the right thing, and take full credit for it, but only if his largesse is financed by taxpayers.

So, instead of focusing on affordable housing, which naturally leads to diverse, vibrant, interesting and desirable communities Tampa’s leaders tend to look for ways to push the working poor away from downtown.

The developers invariably promise something better for the residents of blighted communities, but those promises are empty, as residents end up scattered and the vast majority are never able to return to the neighborhoods from which they were evicted.

Here’s an idea:

why not pump some city and county money into the rehabbing the empty and crumbling downtown buildings such as the Floridan Hotel and the old Kress building? These and tons of other vacant downtown properties could be cut up into apartments and lofts, incorporated as condos, and offered to the working poor as a viable home ownership option.

Downtown would be infused with new energy. Nighttime activities would increase. Vibrant new communities would blossom and grow. The powerless people who we are now talking about dislocating and scattering would suddenly have just a little say in their own future, as they form condo boards and start to practice a little self-determination.

And, as people started using downtown on the evenings and weekends, impressions like this (from the original Tribune article cited at the beginning of this post) would quickly change.

``I've been thinking, `Is Tampa really my place?' '' said Veena Rayapareddi, 33, who moved here from Washington, D.C., two years ago to work for an information technology company. ``I like Tampa, but I don't see much that will keep me here. When I go downtown on a Sunday afternoon, I don't see even one person walking.''