Strategies to Preserve Our Culturally and Economically Diverse Neighborhoods
Protect the Neighborhood:
1. City-wide forum to discuss the impact of rising housing prices and rents on homeowners, renters and homeless.
2. Create permanently affordable housing instead of temporary affordable housing; lobby funders to prioritize funding projects that develop permanently affordable housing.
3. Create more neighborhood control over development activity by passing control to community organizations representative of the community
4. Protect blue-collar jobs
5. Foreclosure relief for families who are at risk of losing their home
Protect Renters:
1. Balance condo conversions that in some studies result in displacement;
2. Create relocation benefits included in CDBG development money;
3. Change landlord - tenant law to give protection against arbitrary eviction
Protect Homeowners:
1. Protect low-income housing stock: Balance low-income affordable rehabs with market rate; one-for-one replacement of affordable housing in demolition contracts and in eviction-for-development scenarios;
2. Limit property tax increases to 2% per year;
3. Use taxation and fees to encourage long-term investment in communities;
Protect Local Business
1. Work with Businesses United for Independent Local Development to give presentations on the importance of local business over chains/franchises;
Protect the Homeless
1. Address vacant housing in neighborhoods
2. Examine why tent cities in public parks are resulting from housing policy
Compiled mostly from Chester Hartman's Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning.