Affordable housing plan good start, but not enough
Affordable housing plan good start, but not enough
Just about every candidate for county and state elected positions has put affordable housing in their list of top priorities. Candidate for mayor of Kauai JoAnn Yukimura has gone a step further and published her plan to help alleviate the shortage of affordable housing (TGI Forum, June 24). She is to be commended for publicly going on record with her plan.
However, simple analysis of what she has published in TGI indicates what I would consider a big disconnect. Her proposed plan would set aside $80 million of Kauai property taxes over 20 years for affordable housing. Her TGI column cites the recently updated Kauai General Plan as projecting the need for 8000 affordable housing units over the next 20 years. Furthermore, she presents the requirement for an average subsidy of about $200,000 per affordable housing unit. Simple arithmetic indicates a total subsidy for the 8000 units would be $1.6 billion.
Even if the $80 million in set aside property taxes was considered as seed money to attract other sources of investment it seems unrealistic to believe investment of over $1 billion would be found for affordable housing on Kauai. In the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t mean to be critical of JoAnn’s intentions nor do I have a workable plan to alleviate the affordable housing shortage. Perhaps if I did, I too would run for Kauai elected office.
Peter Nilsen, Princeville
