Every once in a while, the bike — and curiosity — take my to the 300 block of southeast Burkhart Street in Albany. I want to check if anything has happened on the lot at No. 370.
Everybody these days is talking about the need for affordable housing in Albany. In that connection, a couple of things are going on.
It took a year for the Albany City Council to allocate part of the $1 million the Oregon legislature gave the city to do something about homelessness or the shortage of housing that people can afford.
The Albany City Council wasn’t ready to make a decision Monday about which of five applicants for a share of $1 million in housing funds would get how much.
Maybe it wasn’t a favor for the legislature to give Albany $1 million to do something about affordable housing or homelessness. Now the city council has to decide who gets some of the money, and it’s not an easy choice.
In the interest of making houses more “affordable,” the Albany City Council seems inclined to lower systems development charges on small new single-family dwellings and raise them on big ones. But “affordable” is not a firm number, so whether the idea works is impossible to predict.
Albany prepares to back farmworker housing
The city of Albany is preparing to pave the way for construction of about 160 “affordable” housing units on undeveloped farmland off Spicer Drive.
Tags: affordable housing, Colonia Solidaridad, Farmerworker Housing Development, HUD, Spicer Drive