The Gazette Packet article about the Alfred Street Church monstrosity-building that, with City Council complicity, will disfigure a neighborhood, burden its members with a massive mortgage and result in less, not more, services to the needy it serves is now going destroy 22 houses built with Federal assistance.
Of these three outcomes, the first two are self-inflicted harm; the third strikes me as wrong. At a minimum, it’s repugnant. Based on the information in the article, it appears the Alfred Street Church availed itself of a Federal program to construct “affordable” homes with a financial subsidy courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.
In so doing, again according to the article, the church obliged itself to rent these properties only to tenants of modest incomes through 2019. But to keep on its construction schedule, it’s terminating leases for occupants of the 22 affordable houses two years early. It needs to get rid of these houses. It needs the space they occupy for its monstrosity-building.
And of their tenants? The Alfred Street Church is washing its hands of them. They’re being dumped onto the Alexandria Housing and Redevelopment Authority. And, offended by the criticism for doing so, the ASC defends itself by saying the church didn’t have to help its tenants at all, now in the hour of their need.
Of all the landlords, a church would be the landlord most likely to assist its tenants acquire talents demanded by well-paying employers thereby allowing them to move up in the world and out of “affordable” housing.
Sad too to learn that the tenants are upset, but not because ASC failed to help them better themselves. They are unhappy because the welfare housing they are being offered as equivalent housing is inferior to the housing the ASC provided. Clearly, even the poor have standards as self-serving as their ASC landlord.
Jimm Roberts
Alexandria