A new ordinance is part of an ongoing effort to amend city code in ways that encourage affordable housing development. The ordinance will receive a first reading tonight.
This is a horrible proposal. It would allow lots in the R2 and R3 zones (which contain most of the single family housing in Laramie) to be chopped up by greedy developers into tiny, narrow ones as skinny as 12 feet wide - too narrow to hold a singlewide trailer (because there'd be no place to get out and no room for setbacks). They'd pack squalid housing into tiny spaces and then sell it at higher profits, charging by the going market rate per bedroom. There is no reason for the developers to reduce their prices, because it would mostly be bought by the well-to-do parents of students seeking to extricate their kids from the University's expensive new "luxury" dorms (which it is building specifically to compete with off-campus housing, including that relied upon by local residents for their retirement incomes).
The best way to make housing affordable, given the fixed costs of building materials and labor, is to raise wages - not allow builders to skimp and create cramped, cheap, likely dangerous housing that will destroy the character of the neighborhoods it invades.
Areas around campus impacted by this proposal are sites occupied by historical homes. Will this ordinance allow commercial land developers to tear those homes down and replace them with high density housing?
This is a horrible proposal. It would allow lots in the R2 and R3 zones (which contain most of the single family housing in Laramie) to be chopped up by greedy developers into tiny, narrow ones as skinny as 12 feet wide - too narrow to hold a singlewide trailer (because there'd be no place to get out and no room for setbacks). They'd pack squalid housing into tiny spaces and then sell it at higher profits, charging by the going market rate per bedroom. There is no reason for the developers to reduce their prices, because it would mostly be bought by the well-to-do parents of students seeking to extricate their kids from the University's expensive new "luxury" dorms (which it is building specifically to compete with off-campus housing, including that relied upon by local residents for their retirement incomes).
The best way to make housing affordable, given the fixed costs of building materials and labor, is to raise wages - not allow builders to skimp and create cramped, cheap, likely dangerous housing that will destroy the character of the neighborhoods it invades.
Areas around campus impacted by this proposal are sites occupied by historical homes. Will this ordinance allow commercial land developers to tear those homes down and replace them with high density housing?