Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
The timing of this announcement seemed peculiar, given Pinellas County's well-publicized and serious affordable housing crisis: The Clearwater Housing Authority wants to tear down Homer Villas, a subsidized rental apartment complex for low-income people.
Homer Villas is a tidy, 61-unit complex at Betty Lane and Sunset Point Road. Built in 1982, the cluster of 17 apartment buildings still looks good on the outside, but Housing Authority officials say the interiors are worn. If the complex gets torn down, 172 adults and children who make their home there will have to find some other place to live.
The Housing Authority's announcement about Homer Villas came as it was overseeing the demolition of an older and much bigger public housing complex off Drew Street in Clearwater: the 284-unit Jasmine Courts, perhaps better known by its former name, Condon Gardens. More than 200 families, including 600 children, lived there.
The Housing Authority has plans for the land under both complexes. The 40-acre Jasmine Courts property will become a new community of apartments, townhomes and single-family homes. Some of the units will be subsidized for low-income people, while others will be sold or rented at market prices. The Housing Authority hopes to make a profit on the development, which is designed to fulfill a new philosophy in the provision of public housing: Scatter low-income residents among higher-income people to lessen the chance that the poor will be stigmatized.
At the Homer Villas property, the authority wants to tear down the apartments to build single-family homes that it will sell at "affordable" prices. Those prices have not been reported, but in some areas of Pinellas County, "affordable" homes are selling for more than $150,000.
The Clearwater Housing Authority is not the only one in the Tampa Bay region demolishing older public housing to build anew. Some of those complexes were so old and undersized that renovating them would be prohibitively expensive. However, Homer Villas, which is not as old as much of the housing stock in Clearwater, looks like the type of complex that could be saved with some renovation.
Invariably, the projects that replace demolished public housing complexes have far fewer units, meaning that the inventory of local affordable housing goes down when it needs to go up. And the new projects often include units that are sold rather than rented, so the rental housing market takes a hit. Plus, the newly built townhomes or single-family homes are often sold at prices beyond the financial reach of those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder.
Government officials throughout Pinellas County are extremely worried about where low- and moderate-income people are going to live in the future. The current spike in concern stems from the purchase of mobile home parks by developers who plan to build pricey condominiums where affordable mobile homes stand now. As redevelopment sweeps Pinellas, potentially thousands of mobile home residents may have to search for another place to live. For those who don't have much money, the search will be difficult.
We know now that joining their ranks may be hundreds of people who previously lived in low-income housing projects subsidized by the federal government and managed by local housing authorities.
Housing authorities used to be the safety net that caught the poorest among us. That mission is more important now than ever. Housing authorities in Pinellas County need to partner with local governments to grow the inventory of affordable rental housing, not reduce it.