Strategies to Protect Our Culturally and Economically Diverse Neighborhoods
Protect the Neighborhood(i.e. everyone):
1. City-wide forum to discuss the impact of gentrification and speculation on homeowners, renters and homeless.
2. Create permanently affordable housing as opposed to temporary affordable housing; lobby St. Louis Housing Trust Fund to prioritize funding projects that develop permanently affordable housing.
3. Use eminent domain to enhance low-income housing stock
4. Create more neighborhood control over development activity by passing control to community organizations representative of the community
5. Stop the "gentrification" of jobs: protect blue-collar jobs from replacement with white collar jobs
6. End public subsidies to private developers through tax abatement and facade grants.
7. Foreclosure relief for families who are at risk of losing their home
8. Plan and initiate farmers markets in St. Louis to get fresh affordable produce in areas with no groceries.
Protect Renters:
1. Pass Rent control/stabilization legislation--increases limited to inflation;
2. Control condo conversions that in some studies result in 75% of displacement;
3. Create relocation benefits included in CDBG development money;
4. Greater use of Section 8
5. Change landlord - tenant law to give more protection to tenants against arbitrary eviction
6. Explore and pass "just-cause" eviction
Protect Homeowners:
1. Protect low-income housing stock: Require developers to also do low-income affordable rehabs; 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. Create anti-speculation ordinances: use taxation and fees to discourage; eg Santa Cruz passed a high tax rate for buildings sold within 4 years of purchase or tax the sales profit if sold within 2 years;
4. Examine the role of speculators, real estate owners, developers and predatory refinancers.
Protect Local Business
1. Work with Businesses United for Independent Local Development to give presentations on the importance of local business over chains/franchises; Create "Chain store Free Trade Zones"
Protect the Homeless
1. Address vacant housing owned by speculators
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.