By Sam Lew : 48hills – excerpt
Developer wants luxury housing in Western Addition; residents fear displacement
McCormack Baron Salazar (MBS), which developed the apartments in 2001, plans to replace the public housing complex with 260 luxury units alongside 193 units of public housing in a 19-story tower.
The tenants demanded that the St.Louis-based developer present an alternative set of redevelopment plans with transparency and tenant input; they want to ban any market rate housing and instead ensure that there are units for public and affordable units…(more)
We know the law will probably evict the tenants thanks to our state legislators who removed all protections for tenants and removed local citizens and our government from development decisions, but, we would like to know how our supervisors would handle this if they could. This is also a good reminder that all elections have consequences and we can only vote for people who run. If no on runs to replace those state representatives we are stuck with them.
This is a cut and dried issue. I would like to ask each supervisor to explain to us not what the law says, but how they feel this project. Do they support evicting tenants from a 193-unit pubic apartment complex in order to add 260 luxury units? No additional affordable units will be built and the new “so-called affordable” units will not be as affordable as the current units when they are built. This project will literally remove 193 units of affordable housing and probably throw some people onto the street who can not afford higher “affordable housing” elsewhere.
How much is a person’s life worth? Is it worth disrupting 193 people their fillies and partners, to build 260 luxury units?