“We appreciate [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s] willingness to work with us to turn this agency around so that we can continue to focus on serving our residents who need public and assisted housing.”
What she didn’t say:
It’s nice that the fed now considers the state’s housing agency “standard” instead of “troubled”—the days of slow repair work and derelict units seem to be coming to an end—but HCDCH remains controversial for an entirely different and completely legal reason. Developers wanting to build “affordable housing” units can go through the HCDCH and get their projects “fast-tracked,” which means they need no environmental review and have to face an up-or-down vote by their respective county council within 45 days. This seems great on paper, except when developers like Kent Smith (Pu’unoa, 2003) try to ram through their HCDCH housing projects as “affordable” when they really aren’t. -Anthony Pignataro
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