This forum is an opportunity to advance discussion of policies in Bflo that preserve the status quo, instead of advancing badly needed reform.
In the context of Prof Edw Glaeser's recent high profile advocacy for govt to invest in people not buildings & reducing poverty, BMHA is engaged in another huge building frenzy.
Most dramatic is its proposed 200 unit project on the site of a defunct bowling complex at Main & Amherst. The apartments will house mostly single elderly poor, overwhelmingly women, at a cost of $180K each.
It is in a neighborhood where I several years helped owners reduce assesssments on the adjacent 84 struggling Bennett Village Terrace (BVT) townhouses from $42K to $20K. The most recent BVT sale (#52) last month was $15K.
Ironically, previous BMHA ED Sharon West paid $50K for her BVT home in 1986 . . but moved into BMHA's penthouse apartment at Stuyvesant on Elmwood when the neighborhood became too dangerous. Now a HUD bureacrat in Tampa, she apparenly now rents out her #41 BVT with a generous Section 8 subsidy.
BMHA channels about 1/2 of City Hall's to house less than 10% of the city's poor at incredible cost. Obviously, if Bflo's overwhelming poverty & blight is to be reduced, that must change. BMHA is utterly obsolete in a shrinking city with about 26000 housing vacancies as ever more poor live in blighted dangerous neighborhoods.
Interestingly, new BMHA ED Dawn Sanders has never publicly stated her 'vison' for BMHA . . . as new "Poverty & Blight" Deputy Mayor Donna Brown has also been silent about her plans.
Hopefully somebody will discuss such issues at the forum.
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