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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Recent Met Council quota setting. As always, numbers given without justification or rationale presented. With no real presentation of underlying data as cause to set numbers, as set.

This link.

Is that imperious, or what? The tone of the header paragraph offends greatly -

The Allocation of Affordable Housing Need presented in this table is based on forecasts completed for the 2030 Regional Development Framework adopted in January 2004. As communities submitted formal changes to their comprehensive plan in the past decade, the number of affordable units was updated with any changes to 2010 or 2020 forecasts. However, with the adoption of the new regional development guide, Thrive MSP 2040 (May 2014), no further revisions to these numbers will be made. New information on the Allocation of Affordable Housing Need for 2021-2030 will be released in 2015.

"... based on forecasts completed for the 2030 Regional Development Framework ..." is pure imposition.

"We invent these numbers and impose them" would be a more honest way for Met Council's planners to explain themselves. Further explanation, " ... we pull our numbers out of thin air."

It is, after all, what they do. Yes, affordable housing is needed. Yes, people should not suffer housing depredation because of lack of wealth. Yes, we are the wealthiest nation on the face of the earth, and yes, our poor are given short shrift while our rich are allowed to avoid paying a fair share via governmental policies that are nothing but a nod and a wink. Yes, lobbyists buy favors.

But the heavy hand approach of Met Council sure does gall.

On the bright side, looking at the table, they got Bethel right.

UPDATE: Cutting slack, do these links reassure you much if at all that Met Council knows what it is doing; here and here?

Here's a paragraph from that latter item, having a truth in it, one you can take to Mr. Flaherty -

To further explain this point, some of the new affordable housing need that arises between 2011 and 2020 will be satisfied by units that exist in the private market today. As academic research has shown, the amount of low-income housing in the private market expands from decade-to-decade as older units depreciate in price to maintain occupancy, a process known as “filtering.” This movement between market-rate and affordable pricing does not generally occur among subsidized units, which generally are never “priced up” into the market-rate category. New, low-income households that find housing in older, market-rate units that have “filtered down” in price have their housing needs satisfied without directly consuming land.

And by the time of such filtering down to housing bottom feeders in Ramsey Town Center, where will Darren Lazan and Emily McGlone be and what will each be doing?