The Housing for Every Delawarean Act needs your support. The bill has passed the Senate, and our representatives need to know we need the House to pass this bill. I know that every one of us knows a friend or family member who is being affected by the lack of affordable housing in Delaware. How many do you know who are living with a family member because they cannot afford to live on their own, or worse, are living on the streets?
This bill is not a magic bullet. It will not solve the situation overnight, but instead it moves us from talking about how bad the problem is to making plans on how to solve it. Zoning and land-use restrictions are a major barrier to affordable housing because our zoning laws are carried over from a bygone era. In Delaware, zoning and land use are controlled by the local governments. Each county and municipality must have a comprehensive plan. Municipalities with populations greater than 2,000 are required to have a more detailed plan. One segment of that plan deals with affordable housing.
Some municipalities oppose this plan, claiming it takes away local control for land use. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their comprehensive plans already require them to address affordable housing. This bill simply creates a common target of 20% affordable housing as part of our collective comprehensive plans. It does not enact specific methods. It allows them to develop their own plans with that 20% target, not requirement. It says to them, you cannot just relegate affordable housing to a paragraph in your comprehensive plan with no substantive requirements. Instead, it pushes them to work toward a specific goal of attaining 20% of their housing inventory as affordable. No deadline, just meaningful progress.
You will also hear the term by-right approval. This simply means that once they develop the rules surrounding zoning and land use, if an applicant satisfies all those rules without exception, their application should be approved without public hearings. The public hearings should have taken place when they adopted the rules. So, make the rules and live by them.
The affordable housing crisis is here, and it affects all of us. We can no longer stick our head in the sand and hope the problem goes away. The Affordable Housing for Every Delawarean Bill causes us to work together to begin finding solutions.
Richard J. Murphy
Board president
Luther Towers/Luther Village of Dover
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