Workforce Housing

A recent article in the News Journal tells the tale of community resistance to new rules for developers in New Castle County. Objections seem to arise from people in developments in more rural parts of the County. Those people moved to their homes in an effort to escape city living. Meanwhile the median price of a new home in the County has risen to $400,000, above the affordable range for many working families and young professionals.

As County Executive, Chris Coons favors the inclusion of housing designed to be more affordable for those now excluded by pricing. The Workforce Housing Ordinance aims to allow developers to add additional housing at a higher density in order to make the homes lower in cost.

Under it, developers can increase a neighborhood's density by 50 percent to 100 percent if they set aside 20 percent of the homes they build as affordable to low- or moderate-income buyers. The county defines that as people earning between $36,000 and $86,000.

The goal is an admirable one which allows diversity of community and provides allowance for those people earning less than many in our society today.

Recent statistics suggest people earning above $105,000 are in the top 10% of wage earners these days. If that number is true, the new housing is aimed at the majority of people in our nation today. We as a nation must become more inclined to include others in our lives. We are a nation based on diversity. We cannot afford to continue our current course of exclusion in housing, in jobs, or in any measure of life.

I support workforce housing in our community development. We must allow those of lesser means (and $86,000 in income is not "lesser" by most thinking) to enjoy the fruits of their labor in housing, too. We must not continue to drive the housing market into the stratosphere of greater than $400,000 homes lest we find no place for our future generations to live at all.