So just when is affordable housing affordable?
It’s been a long time since I last rented a place to sleep at night. Covering meetings related to the serious housing shortage in Rome has been cause for pause, because I can’t imagine paying what is considered “affordable” rent nowadays.
To be honest with you, I don’t even remember what I paid for rent when I was living in a townhome way out on Leafmore Road years ago. I think it was $550 a month; something in that vicinity, anyway. It was a two-bedroom, maybe one and a half bath, property.
Nowadays, folks in the real estate business are talking about getting as much as $950 a month for a twobedroom, one-bath place, though the units I’m talking about here do have all stainless steel appliances.
Stainless steel is nice, but when you eat most of your meals at Chick-fil-a, it doesn’t matter a whole lot.
That whole $950 a month thing would scare me to death. Imagine paying that kind of money and not even getting to write it off on your taxes.
I’m not even going to try to tell you how little I have been paying in mortgage payments for the three-bedroom, one-bath house that I finally paid off last month. But it was well south of $950 a month.
Some people consider the housing shortage a chicken and egg type of conundrum. If there aren’t a wealth of jobs available, do we need the houses? Can we attract new jobs without an abundance of places for folks to live?
I really believe the latter is more applicable to today’s market.
Missy Kendrick and Heather Seckman are working like crazy to lure new jobs to Rome and Floyd County. I talk to each of them about as many days as not, and I know that folks are looking at Rome and Floyd County.
Housing is apparently a legitimate issue for some of the companies that are likely to bring in a significant number of new people. They want nice housing that is convenient to everything that is going on in town.
We’ve witnessed a shift in the most desirable locations over the last decade or so. Seems like a growing number of people want to be closer to the urban core. In this case, downtown Rome.
As I walk around downtown, there aren’t a whole lot of spaces available for new housing.
The Four Stone Real Estate group is seeking to develop as many as 200 new units over in the River District along West Third Street. We’re talking apartments, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with apartments — except, of course, for the previously referenced high rents that are being bandied about.
Rome is not Atlanta.
Thank God.
The payscale for so-called workforce housing is not, in this ol’ boy’s way of thinking, $1,000 to $1,200 a month. That’s upscale living in this fella’s book.
Real upscale. And I worry a little bit about whether the Rome market may be tapped out for upscale rents. All those lofts are getting that much and more, but people are paying dearly for the convenience of living downtown.
The problem, as I talk to builders and real estate pros, is that they’re telling me it is extremely difficult to build ANYTHING in today’s market and keep costs under that level.
The cost of lumber has soared through the roof and I’m wondering exactly how that happened. Seems to me it wasn’t that long ago when builders were complaining about the low cost of subsidized Canadian lumber pouring into the Lower 48. What happened?
During the last city housing summit, one of the presenters pitched the idea of micro-community living with as many as eight single family homes on tiny lots. The homes were selling for less than $200,000 and I kind of like that idea. I can think of a couple of places where that kind of community could flourish in Rome.
One of them is the property at First Avenue and Fourth Street near Central Plaza, right there at the entrance to the Silver Creek/kingfisher trails. That’s a 3-acre lot owned by Echota Realty and I imagine you could put maybe 12 or more homes there in a micro-community. It would be easily walkable to downtown, with shopping at Central Plaza.
All you’ve got to do there is deal with the trains that service the Summit Hill Foods mill.
I think the land that Robinson & Fountain Properties owns out Riverside Parkway between Chieftains and Pick O’ Deli also would be ideal for a micro-community. That’s a 6-plus-acre tract, which is obviously subject to high water on the lower portions, but I’ll bet you could fit 15 to 20 homes in that location.
Before you go off on me for cutting down a lot of beautiful trees, consider that there is still another 13 acres just to the north of that tract owned by Floyd County. I haven’t heard anyone over in the County Administration Building talk about selling off any of that land and I wouldn’t want them to.
It’s clear, though, that somebody’s got to start building in Rome and Floyd County and, in my line of thought, they’ve got to be able to meet a price point closer to $800 a month to be real “workforce” homes.