Sunday, January 01, 2012

Nimbys & Numbers

CMHA wanted to spend $640,000 to renovate a uilding on Cincinnati's west side. The building has 12 units. They moved the current residents out & now the usual loudmouths are promoting the demolition of the building saying too much subsidized housing is concentrated in their community.
Nevermind this:
it [Westwood] now has about 1,100 subsidized housing units, or about 6 percent of all it's housing units. That’s less than subsidized housing’s 11.5 percent share city-wide
My question is, why does it cost so much & why move the residents around like cattle? That cost comes out to $53,000 per unit. Habitat for Humanity could build a whole house for that much. People routinely renovate their homes without moving out of them.

The Fishwrap's not very in depth article here

The Bacon's take here

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Substantial rehabs of multifamily buildings are extremely expensive. $50k+ isn't out of the ordinary, especially considering the scope of the renovation in question. It's my understanding that they were going to be modernizing the HVAC and other systems. Not to mention that I'm sure they would take the units down to the studs to renovate.

Unknown said...

I forgot to mention: this is just silliness anyways. Would they prefer an un-renovated public housing building over a new, modernized one? Because that's what they're going to get if they get in the way of what needs to be done.

Quimbob said...

It appears that is EXACTLY what they are going to get since the building doesn't fit HUDs criteria for demolition.