To the editor:
The former Athens City Comprehensive Plan has housing priorities all wrong. Let’s make sure the next one gets it right.
Planners and administrators, take a map of the city, and draw a circle with a radius of 3/4 mile centered on the monument on college green. Call that zone “The Elephant in the Room” – quit feeding the Elephant. For the rest of the City, plan appropriately. You can not ignore the differences between the zones. If you continue to feed the Elephant tax incentives, and parking and zoning variances then more families will flee. Make the neighborhoods liveable by maintaining the infrastructure and enforcing the zoning laws on the books. Quit giving tax breaks and zoning variances out like candy. Every tax break you give to some business or developer increases my share of the tax burden for an infrastructure that you have let decay. This needs to stop
On housing in particular, our plan here has a section on housing. It starts out with an accurate depiction of the problem of student rental pressure on housing availability.
After diagnosing the problem correctly it goes on with proposals to make it worse. Here are some of the so called solutions.
Accessory Dwelling Units(ADU’s), Denser development, smaller lots, ignore parking requirements are all really bad ideas for Athens.
Turning garages into apartments is already happening. Our zoning code forbids this (wink wink) but this is being allowed and encouraged now.
Are they being used as middle class housing? No, they are Airbnb’s or student rentals. Higher density housing is a solution for San Francisco or Vancouver where the cause of the shortage is income inequality and NIMBY-ism, it won’t solve our problem here.
I could go on.
Decrease minimum lot size… this will only lead to more student rentals.
Denser development this will only lead to more student rentals.
TIF (Tax Increment Financing):
This isn’t going to help. It takes more words than I have to explain it here, but basically we need to stop the tax incentive shenanigans where homeowners pay taxes and developers don’t.
So where did these ideas come from?
ADU’s and density are all the rage in the world of city planner conference and academia. But the causes in other places are not the causes of our shortage. You don’t solve the student rental takeover of neighborhoods by making conversion of housing into more units per square foot easier. Athens is dominated by a university that has chosen to increase in size and put a housing burden on the city. For years city government has favored the student rental industry. We are living in a crisis that our previous plan enabled and encouraged. The next plan can not make the same mistake.
Tom Hanlin
Athens, Ohio