Louisville 10th worst for high black poverty areas

As the Metro Council debates ways to encourage affordable housing in the East End, a New York-based think tank released a report showing Louisville is the 10th worst city for concentrated black poverty in the nation.

About 43 percent of the poorest black residents in the Louisville metro area are housed in neighborhoods where the federal poverty rate was 40 percent or more, according to the report by the Century Foundation.

Cathy Hinko, executive director of the Metro Housing Coalition, who is lobbying for the council to adopt affordable housing incentives that would encourage developments for low-income residents, said the report’s findings can be linked to the country’s foreclosure crisis a decade ago.

“We haven’t recovered from that and some of the people left behind were people in subsidized housing who really didn’t have a place to move and didn’t face foreclosure,” she said.

The foundation’s report shows the country has seen a rapid re-concentration of poverty, especially in midsized cities such as Louisville since 2000. The number of Americans living in concentrated areas of poverty increased to 13.8 million from 7.2 million in that time.

Only nine other metro areas — including Milwaukee, Wis.; Gary, Ind.; Cleveland; and Detroit — have higher concentrations of black poverty than Louisville, according to the Century report.

Metro Council’s special land development committee is considering a proposal that aims to tear down such racial and economic housing barriers in Louisville.

On Monday, the committee weighed whether to created Mixed Residential Development Incentives, which are meant to encourage developers to build affordable housing units in single-family resident districts, which represent about 80 percent of the city’s land use. Affordable and small rental unit construction are currently barred in those zoning districts.

Under the proposal, incentives would provide a “density bonus” for projects where at least 10 percent of the units were multifamily and 5 percent affordable as defined by low-income-housing tax credit standards.

Ahead of Monday’s committee meeting, a draft of that new provision said developers using the incentives would not be allowed within a one-mile radius of one another. Housing advocates charged that some council members were trying to water down the incentives to “quarantine” minorities, single mothers and the disabled from living in more affluent neighborhoods.

Councilman James Peden, the ad hoc committee’s chairman, said after the meeting that he had sought guidance from the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office on limiting the proximity of the incentives.

Peden, R-23rd District, said he wasn’t backing that specific language but reiterated that he and other members are trying to avoid a cluster of affordable or multifamily housing in any council district.

“I support dispersion,” he said. “I’m willing to lower it to something that’s doable, it doesn’t do any good if there’s only five places to use this in the county if the radius creates barriers. I didn’t write the one-mile thing, they wrote it up that way. If there’s another way to achieve it, I’m OK with that too.”

Some council members such as Democrats Brent Ackerson, D-26th, and Rick Blackwell, D-12th, said they agreed with Peden that it is important to keep the new incentives from being used to cluster affordable and multifamily housing units. But other committee members argued such a move would make the incentives less attractive to builders.

“There are a number of people who would like to see these developments dispersed around the county,” said Councilman Bill Hollander, D-9th. “But this doesn’t do that. It only limits where they can be built adjacent to one another.”

He said the one-mile radius was an “11th-hour” change that “was not well thought out.”

The special panel approved two minor changes to zoning rules last month allowing multifamily residential projects to be built in office residential districts and permitting attached housing units to be built in special zones without requiring an overall zoning change. The committee voted to table discussion on the affordable housing incentives until its meeting later this month.

Hinko said that Jefferson County residents “have to have true choice” on where they want to live. “I’m not saying this change to the land code will solve everything, but it’s one piece and a point of intervention to say we offer affordable choices everywhere.”

Reporter Phillip M. Bailey can be reached at (502) 582-4475. Follow him on Twitter at @phillipmbailey