Last night I attended the public meeting in Odessa to discuss “Workforce Housing” plans for the Vance Neck Rd. area. Workforce Housing is a concept that encourages builders to create affordable housing, by waiving fees and loosening regulations and increasing density. The ordinance that enabled this process was approved by New Castle County Council on Feb. 26th of this year.
What it has allowed developers to do is resubmit plans for developments already on the books, and double the density of the land. All of this with almost no further review by the county or any other entity. No additional reviews are required by DNREC for storm water. No additional reviews are required by DelDOT to assess whether or not the roads can support the additional traffic. No one checks with the school district to see what capacity problems this might cause. And any of these things that need to be done after the fact, will be borne by the state, county and school district, not the developer.
This is a huge win for developers. The housing market has tanked. They can no longer sell their $450,000 McMansions, so they can save money on fees, open space requirements, infrastructure reviews and sell twice as many homes at half the cost. What we really are doing is bailing out speculators. They bought the land hoping to sell it at a tidy profit, but when the market went south they needed a better way to off-load this land.
There were some pretty frustrated people at the meeting last night. To his credit, Penrose Hollins showed up, since he was the sponsor of the Workforce Housing ordinance. Unfortunately, he essentially accused the people at the meeting of never showing up at the County meetings and voicing their opinions. At some point in his speech last night, he realized that he wasn’t going to convince anyone in that room of anything and he handed the mic back and walked out of the room. Stupidly, he went out the main entrance and ended up getting into a bunch of small verbal confrontations with the people in the overflow area. He ended up having to call the police to come ensure his safety.
I’ll have more on this later, but here’s what you can do today. Call Chris Coons. Call him this morning. Call him now. Ask him to put a hold on all workforce housing projects until County Council meets to address the issues of southern NCC. His number is (302) 395-5101. There needs to be some planning around workforce housing and there hasn’t been any.