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First piece of Creighton redevelopment before Council on Monday
01/21/2017 6:39 PM by John M
Funding for the first piece of Creighton redevelopment is on the Consent Agenda for this Monday’s City Council meeting:
- ORD. 2016-300 To authorize the Chief Administrative Officer, for and on behalf of the City of Richmond, to execute a Cooperation Agreement, as amended, between the City of Richmond and the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority for the purpose of facilitating the design, planning, engineering, and construction of certain infrastructure improvements to support a mixed-income rental housing development at 1501 North 31st Street and 1611 North 31st Street in the city of Richmond.
This authorizes the city to spend $8,535,564 on “constructing and developing an affordable housing development” at the former Armstrong High site.
I’m all for it if it happens, but can someone explain to me how this development doesn’t become another center of concentrated poverty?
Rather than being a community that is 100% multi-family public housing, the new community will be mixed income, with market rate, work force, and low-income housing. The units would be configured as single-family and multi-family dwellings, with a mix of rental and owner-occupied.
The complete plan call for one-for-one replacement of the 500 existing units at Creighton, and the development of approximately 1,000 mixed-income homes (both rental and owner-occupied) at Armstrong, the current Creighton location, and along Nine Mile Road.
@#1, I think that’s an excellent question. This location, being right next to Creighton, appears to be an extension of Richmond’s largest concentration of poverty and public housing. Aren’t Fairfield, Mosby and Whitcomb Courts all nearly contiguous with Creighton?
@#2 Having also read the plans for this project and spoken with people working in it at some length, it does read as an expansion of the public housing projects of the deep East End. There is NO guarantee that the market rate and work-force rate units will attract buy-in at those price points. So this is quite possibly the creation of another 1000 units of public housing on Nine Mile, and a serious expansion of the concentration of poverty in Richmond.
I think Dubois2 understands my question. I know the plan and the theory, but has this worked somewhere before that RRHA can point to? I do not see owner occupation happening here and best case is it becomes 2/3 rental and 1/3 public housing that will fall deeper into disrepair with every passing year.