INCLUSIONARY ZONING part 2

INCLUSIONARY ZONING

Susannah Levine and Adam Gross of Chicago’s Business and Professional People for the Public Interest believe in the power of Inclusionary Housing.

“Inclusionary housing is an extraordinarily effective and efficient way for cities to create affordable housing,” they said. (Author, consultant, former mayor of Albuquerque) David Rusk has calculated that if the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States had adopted typical Inclusionary Housing programs (a 15 percent set-aside on ten or more units), between 1980 and 2000 those 100 programs would have produced 2.6 million affordable units. That's almost twice as many units as were built using the most productive federal affordable housing program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. Montgomery County, MD, which has the longest-running Inclusionary Housing program in the country, has created more than approximately 11,000 affordable units since its program began in 1974.”

Derek Camunez, a Denver Realtor, sees things differently.

“We believe that mandating affordable housing is not nearly as effective as providing builder incentives such as tax breaks, creative zoning for higher densities and speeding up the permitting process for providing access to affordable housing,” he said.

“Denver's annual report on the Inclusionary Building Ordinance is finding that the affordable housing stock is not significantly increasing. Moreover, the city is discovering that they are not getting the desired cross cultural families taking advantage of this housing stock that they had hoped.”