17 Comments to 'A rebuttal on the Minvilla project'
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A rebuttal on the Minvilla project
Posted By katie allison granju
Robert Finley, with Knoxville’s Ten Year Plan to end homelessness, was kind enough to offer a thoughtful and detailed respnse to my post below about the concerns I share with others in the 37917 zip code about the Minvilla transitional housing project.
Here’s what he has to say:
I want to correct some misinformation with this comment. I’ll spare you the torment of trying to answer every conceivable question you might have, but hopefully it’ll bring them a little closer to understanding why this project costs what it does and what is its purpose.
So let me bring you up to speed on a few aspects of Minvilla.
Cost: well below $200/sf.
Minvilla is an expensive project because it’s historic rehab. When early estimates hit the papers and the pixelverse, they were very low. The former developer made the best estimate that he could with the information he had at the time. We now have much better information (completed construction documents, for one thing) and a firm estimate. It is much higher than the preliminary one to which people indexed their expectations, but it is also realistic. Based on revised cost estimates and post-rehab square footage, the cost is well below $200 per square foot.
Corporate investors will supply approximately 75% of this project’s funding. The investors who purchase the equity generated by historic tax credits and low-income housing tax credits, the bank issuing the mortgage, the Federal Home Loan Bank, all of those are ultimate sources of funding for this project and others like it. These investors see this project as a good investment in our community, and their dollars could come to Knoxville from anywhere.
Another 25% of the funding for Minvilla will be public funds set aside by the Federal Government for the purpose of making housing available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it. Other dollars are set aside by the Feds to be disbursed by local entities like the City and County, both of which are committed to ending chronic homelessness.
Developer interest
Nobody involved with this project is seriously entertaining notions of developing some other permanent supportive housing project in lieu of Minvilla or of selling the property to a private developer. Any professional developer who considers purchasing this property is probably going to be aware that prior to its transfer to Volunteer Ministry Center, at least two different developers tried to make a go of something there and couldn’t make the numbers work. That was in a much stronger real estate market with much lower construction costs than today’s. If Minvilla were such an attractive property to developers, VMC would not own it right now.
Too, Minvilla has access to low-income housing equity to the tune of about $2 million. That’s around a third of this project’s financing. That money goes away if you do a market rate project there.
Expansion of what?
Minvilla does expand the footprint of VMC in 5th & Broadway. That is a technical fact. But Minvilla’s not a business-as-usual expansion of homeless services in the mission district. And that is the truth.
Minvilla is permanent supportive housing, which is the proven, effective approach that we will use to end chronic homelessness in Knoxville. Minvilla’s not going to be a shelter or transitional housing or a feeding program or a street ministry or a sidewalk-strangling swarm of panhandlers. Instead, it’s going to be an apartment complex that will house rent-paying residents.
All of Minvilla’s residents will have some things in common: relationship with a case manager, some form of income, accountability, healthier relationships. The most significant of those things they’ll have in common? They won’t be homeless anymore. They’ll be like this guy: http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=53221
Gary Waddell is the kind of resident who’ll be at Minvilla. He’s one reason that it’s fair and true to say that Minvilla does not represent an expansion of service to homeless people. Minvilla is about ending homelessness.
Robert Finley
Ten-Year Plan
215-3071
rfinley@cityofknoxville.org
http://knoxtenyearplan.org
Jul 18th, 2008
Thanks, Katie.
One thing, and it’s very significant. Minvilla is definitively not transitional housing. It’s permanent supportive housing. There’s a big difference.
Still. Thanks. Very much.
Robert
Lets see here what Robert said : 25 % of the funds will be public funds ( my tax dollars) Also; OTHER DOLLARS are set aside by the feds ( more of my tax dollars) No where in the constitution does it say that my tax dollars are to be used to feed are give shelter to the homeless. Most of witch choose to be homeless. I have no problem when money is donated by individiuals or churches for these groups. I have help many homeless folks myself. But my tax dollars should never be used.
Minvilla is the least of your concerns as to the use of federal dollars to support those who are willfully abusing “the system.”
What this country needs is a systematic audit of those on welfare, disability, Medicare, living in Section 8 housing, etc. These entitlement programs are so rife with fraud and abuse by people who are just working the system that the original purpose of these programs has been completely lost.
Everywhere that states have taken a serious look at those on the public dole, there have been significant cost-savings to the hard-working taxpayers. It’s time to demand a real accounting before laying out even more tax dollars. When we’re sure that the majority of the fraud has been squeezed out and that there are sufficient safeguards in place to prevent it from re-occurring, then we can talk about new spending.
It’s not a coincidence that families began to break down and the culture coarsened considerably when the government started paying able-bodied people not to work…
Here is what the folks running these shelters don’t seem to get: the neighborhoods surrounding the shelters are mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it anymore. We are tired of having every piece of the fabric of Knoxville’s homeless services located in our small community while the entire rest of Knoxville is left unscathed by the blight that comes with these service providers. We are tired of having our wishes and views ignred by the shellter CEOs (who all make well upwards of 120K a year, by the way, and all live in other areas of town). We are tired of having to drive through crowds of drunk and mentally ill poeple all up and down that stretch of Broadway - a problem that gets worse and worse and worse with each passing year.
We’ve had it. The city doesn’t seem to get that yet (why do they not have the police clean those sidewalks up?), and the shelter directors don’t either. But change is in the air. The neighborhoods are now full of smart, engaged, outspoken people who are no longer going to put up with unfettered, overpriced expansion of the mission district. These services are going to have to start locating elsewhere.
Interestingly, I think that if you polled the 37917 resident demographic, you would find exceptionally (for Knoxville) politically progressive people, many of whom actually work in the helping services (social work, medicine, public interest law, etc). It’s not that we don’t want the homeless population to get help and services, it’s that we think the way Knoxville has been doing it and seems to want to continue to do it simply isn’t working for anyone. The homeless deserve better. The taxpayers deserve better. And our neighborhoods are done with having the entirety of a problem most of Knoxville doesn’t want to see dumped - literally - into our backyards.
I recently saw a TV special on this approach to ending homelessness. Unlike so many other things in this world, this actually works—which means that every Republican on the planet will be against it.
Way to paint Republicans with a broad brush Aulder Guy…Too bad you’re 100% off base.
1) Show me actual results, and I’m willing to consider the option. I noticed how you neatly sidestepped any attempt to address the fraud and abuse in the current system which, you’re right, a large number of Republicans are absolutely up in arms about.
This sort of “I’ll just claim they’re all cold-hearted and evil,” rhetoric is a transparent attempt to silence debate on the subject while attempting to change the subject. Sorry, but it’s going to take more than half-witted quasi-insults to solve these sorts of social problems which is probably why you lack the capacity to participate constructively in the process.
2) The loudest complaints about this project are coming from the left-side of the political aisle, i.e., the “progressives” who think that helping homeless people is great so long as you do it somewhere else where they’re not affected by it.
LIke Ted Kennedy who’s all for wind turbines except when they might intrude upon the view from his home in Martha’s Vineyard, the sad truth is that most on the Left are great at coming up with solutions to all the world’s ills while sitting in a coffeehouse but terribly lacking when it comes to a willingness to be inconvenienced themselves in order to achieve those same solutions.
This is one of those cases, and we can see how “progressives” howl and come up with all sorts of excuses about how it shouldn’t be in *their* neighborhood rather than welcoming the sort of project they were just talking about while sipping wine with their friends yesterday.
But that was when they thought it was going to be in somebody else’s backyard, wasn’t it?
3) Comments like yours are exactly the knee-jerk stupidity that any serious discussion can do without. If you had something substantiative to say, you should and, I’m sure, would have said it. Your pathetic attempt at being clever did nothing more than put on public display how little you have to contribute.
I sympathize with the North Knox problem but you are fighting uphill to get other neighborhoods on board with moving the transients to their neighborhoods.
I can see how the residents of this area would like to increase the value of their real estate while at the same time decreasing the value in other areas of town, but that won’t happen without a major all out war.
I am not sure why you didn’t see this as a negative on the value of your property when you bought it. Trying to transfer the problem to people who knew better than to buy in a blighted area seems disingenuous.
Thanks for the update.
The issue is not neighborhood v. neighborhood; it is doing what is best for our city. The over-concentration of homeless services is wrong no matter what area it is in. Why? Over-concentration attracts more of those in need which overtaxes the services which causes an increase in the services which attracts…well, the cycle of despair is not good for any or any neighborhood. Already, the homeless are creeping further north and west…
After much information has been learned about the astonishing cost of the Minvilla project, unanswered questions still remain; the main ones are:
1. Given that the estimated cost of VMC’s Minvilla project is now “north of $6,000,00″ (according to 6/20 quote from the Ten Year Plan’s Housing Coordinator) and has been rising at ~$100k per month, why are not the many and much less expensive alternatives being pursued?
2. How does it make sense to house fragile and recently homeless individuals immediatly adjacent to those who could easily re-enable the activities which may have caused their homelessness in the first place.
According to the same quote from the Ten Year Plan’s Housing Coordinator (Link…), the cost “is…kind of a moving target” so we don’t actually know what the final cost will be; however, we do know that many more and less expensive options are available now. (Link…)
Much has been made of my ~$200/sq ft calculation of this $6+mm and ~30,000 sq foot project but rather than argue the math…real questions need answering. Why not help more people with more efficient use of funds? Why not help them sooner by using readily available properties? Why not locate them in an area where they are less likely to be tempted or preyed upon?
Bill -
Your entire comment seems to rest on your contention that:
“Over-concentration attracts more of those in need…”
I don’t see any logical reason why this argument should be true. I mean, there’s the obvious case that people who are in need tend to go where their needs are being met but I don’t think you’re seriously attempting to argue here that the services themselves are going to create more needy people. And if the goal is serve *all* the people who are in need of services, I don’t see anything inherently wrong about centralizing the place to go to get those services. In fact, to the extent that people claim there would be problems there, it would be better to contain any potential problems to a single easily policed location than spreading them throughout the area (providing you buy into that argument in the first place).
Your argument about these people being in close proximity to those who will “re-enable” is less valid than saying that they will be in close proximity to support services and others sharing their struggle (e.g., AA, NA, etc) and therefore less likely to relapse than if they were forced to go it on their own in a more isolated location.
As far as considering alternatives, etc., I believe that the rebuttal letter points out that the property in question didn’t have any serious prospects for economically productive use, even citing two previously failed attempts to develop there. In addition, 3/4 of the funding is coming from private sources which means that if that’s how they want to spend their money then a) I’m sure they’ve looked into other viable alternatives before deciding to go ahead with this one and have already determined this is the most efficient use of their money, and b) the great thing about it being their money, is that they can do whatever they want with it. So, as far as the cost is a concern, then as a majority privately-financed projects, for the most part it’s not our concern.
Compare the relatively small portion of federal/state money being used to develop this project to what it would cost in tax dollars for the government to go it alone (which it would most likely have to do otherwise), and it sounds to me like the city is getting a pretty good deal overall.
Hi Jim,
Ginny Weatherstone who is Executive Director of VMC stated (in a local paper) that Knoxville attracts homeless and the annual study by Dr. Richard Nooe reveals that 3/4’s of the homeless here are not from Knox County. Nearly $1mm of taxpayer funds have been given to VMC recently which I believe makes it relevant to question how these funds are spent. They have been given alternatives but are focused on Minvilla…decentralization of those in need, whether it be Minvilla, Hope VI at College Homes or Cabrini Green in Chicago works. Creating a corral of despair doesn’t…it is what Knoxville has been doing and continues to do..but for some reason, we keep expecting different results. This is the very reason that Charlotte has been successful and why LA is decentralizing as well. Knoxville has the greatest over-concentration of homeless services and our problems are getting worse not better.
As to whether we should care about how VMC spends its mix of public and private funds or whether they continue with an overconcentration model that is doomed to fail should be important to us all. These fragile individuals need our help.
Kind regards,
Bill Pittman
Bill “These fragile individuals ” in this group # about 20 % of the total of the group the rest are sucking the life out of the comunity that they inhabit
Even more reason to decentralize…
Hi Bill,
I’m not familiar with Dr. Nooe’s study. Did his findings include the origins of those individuals from outside Knox county? My question is mainly because I am wondering if they are existing homeless from neighboring counties or they are “being imported” as it were. If they are from neighboring counties, then this is the same pattern we see in municipalities across the nation where the homeless tend to congregate in the nearest large city where support services and what economic opportunities that do exist in the area are more likely to be found.
As far as creating “corrals of despair” and likening the situation to Cabrini Green, I would wholeheartedly agree that such a solution would be undesirable. However, decentralizing has its own hazards as Memphis has found as crime and drugs have expanded throughout the “rabbit ears” on the north side of the city as they attempted to do just that. See this:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/ignoring-the-demographics-of-murder-is-dangerous/
I’m pretty sure that repeating the mistakes of Memphis’ (and other municipalities) is not something you would care to do either.
The problem with prior centralized solutions such as Cabrini Green is that, in essence, these people were thrown into a central location but then forgotten. There were no support services being provided and the local law enforcement neither cared nor even bothered to police it appropriately to prevent lawlessness from taking over and keep those who were actually attempting to improve their lives safe from the criminal element which should have been removed had the project been properly operated.
So it’s not exactly a parallel situation to what we’re talking about with Minvilla. In my opinion, the best way to make sure that a) these people have the best chance of success, and b) that the surrounding area (by which I mean not just the immediate neighborhood but the entire Knoxville area) doesn’t suffer as a result of this is to make sure that there are robust support services and full cooperation with local law enforcement rather than simply spreading out the issue across the area where it is much harder to track and control.
I look forward to your response,
Jim
Jim one more time the biggest % of these people do not want success they have choose to live this life you can throw all the the money you want at it. The drugs and crime that comes with it will always be thier, thier is no amount of money are conseling that will ever change that. I would prefer that my tax money go to better uses.
Spanky
Spanky -
You’re preaching to the choir in many respects (see my first comment on this thread regarding my feelings about how our tax dollars are being used). I think we, as a society, place far too little emphasis on the personal responsibility and far too much on measuring success in dealing with problems by how much money we’ve thrown at them without demanding (or even so much as expecting) results for all the money we’ve spent. I could spend hours regaling you with horror stories of my wife’s work with far too many on the public dole who have no interest in ever getting off of it and who are actually teaching and encouraging their children to spend their lives doing the same. So you and I are definitely on the same page in many respects…
In this particular case though, it doesn’t seem that we’re talking about “if” a project is going forward: that much seems a foregone conclusion. It’s a matter of “where” and “how” it goes forward. If projects to help the needy are implemented, I much prefer solutions which are primarily funded and operated by people using their own funds: putting their money where their mouth is as it were - which, it seems, for the most part these folks seem to be doing. Would I prefer that they do it without using any tax dollars? Of course, who wouldn’t? But if they can produce actual measurable results, I’m not against “an ounce of prevention” which may result in even greater tax savings than having to pay for the “pound of cure” which may result from allowing problems to spiral out of control by not taking positive steps to address them at all.
I’m more than willing to admit this may not be the case, but the debate in this thread seems to be primarily about in whose backyard this project belongs with those who live in the immediate area pretty much saying “anywhere but here.” I am willing to be convinced that the current location and form might not be the optimal one, but I am not yet swayed by the arguments presented thus far.
Good points Jim. In my opinion, decentralization of homeless would be preferable simply because they can still be assigned case managers but removing them from Knoxville’s skid row would put them closer to more successful humans and service level jobs that could help lift them from dependency on substances and/or others.
In terms of full disclosure, I live in the Fourth & Gill neighborhood and I do not mind have one of the homeless services adjacent to my neighborhood but I would disagree with putting such a high concentration in any area. It is really not about a particular neighborhood, it is about what is best for our City.
About 1/2 of the Knoxville’s homeless are not from Tennessee according to Dr. Nooe’s studies and 3/4’s are not from Knox County with ~1/3 referencing social services and shelters as reasons for coming here.
Over-concentration is what we have had and it doesn’t appear to be working.
Just my .02,
Bill