Help to expand affordable home ownership opportunities!
Part of my work at MAF focuses on the promotion of limited equity cooperative housing in the Mission. I am working in coordination with the San Francisco Community Land Trust to promote cooperatives to low-income tenants in the Mission. The SFCLT is currently forming a limited equity cooperative at 53 Columbus in Chinatown. The project is the only one in the country where the community land trust (CLT) model is being used to prevent the displacement of low-income working class people. In addition, the ground floor of the building will become the new home of the Asian Law Caucus.
As part of the development process, the building has to be converted from an apartment building to a cooperative. Because the building is over 16 units, the San Francisco Subdivision Ordinance prevents the conversion. The SFCLT is working with its partners so that an exception for affordable housing cooperatives can be created. An "affordable housing cooperative" would be a cooperative in which at least 50% of the occupants are 80% of the area median income (AMI) and below. Please join MAF in supporting this pending legislation. If you would like more information please contact me directly at 415-839-6637.
Great job, Rhea. We need to talk more about this. Cooperatives would be a great application for Taos/Taos County. AS you mention in your blog articles, our biggest hurdle to affordable or even workforce housing is the regulatory environment and public sentiment that encourage large lot rural subdivisions over compact cooperative housing. I include condominiums, as they are structured under New Mexico law, as a form of coorpoerative housing because they require the cooperation of the owners in their day to day lives. We also have a long way to go to recognize rental housing as a real and positive element in the community.
From a planning standpoint, we need to look more carefully at traditional zoning and how it discourages ownership (and often rental) to those living below the middle income level. Now, in fact, traditional zoning is starting to exclude all but those living in the upper middle income and above brackets. Smart Code-type communities allow many individuals an families to live without owning a car or with only one car. This is evident in the Mission District and in complete neighborhoods in cities all over the world. We need to embrace Smart Growth community design standards and zoning laws that use each community's unique characteristics to create the zone types and use mixes appropriate for each community/neighborhood.
Hopefully, the days of vast single-family-home-only neighborhoods are coming to a close.
Thanks for your work,
Dave
David B. DiCicco
Architect Planner, LLC
120 Bertha Road
Taos, New Mexico 87571
P 575-737-5080