The city’s most consequential development of the last year came and went with little fanfare. On Sept. 23, Richmond’s City Council approved eight new apartment projects totaling $313 million in capital investment and 1,007 affordable housing units — a substantial victory for a city, and region, struggling to tame escalating home prices and rising rents.
It’s mostly attributable to an affordable housing grant program administered by the Richmond Economic Development Authority. In exchange for agreeing to restrict rentals to individuals making less than the average median income — renters, on average, can make no more than 60% of the AMI, which is currently $66,180 for a family of four — the developers receive annual grants from the EDA equal to the “incremental increase” in their annual property tax bills. It’s essentially a tax abatement program in disguise: the property owners pay their real estate taxes, but the EDA then cuts a check covering the annual increase back to the developer — for the next 30 years.
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“We’re taking a ‘kitchen sink approach’ to affordable housing. It takes the trust fund, the performance grants, finding ways to speed up the development process,” explained Lincoln Saunders, the city’s chief administrative officer, during a recent interview. “It’s going to take these tools and more to get out of our housing crisis.”…