Who’s Setting Fire to the American Dream?
This week started for my family with some disturbing news from my former island home of Hawai’i: a fire had devoured a multi-million-dollar oceanfront affordable housing development on Kauai, which was just a few months short of completion, with scores of families slated to move in this spring.
Absent sufficient alternative explanations, the authority has not ruled out arson as the prime cause.
Who are the arsonists? Why have they set ablaze so many people’s American Dream?
According to the Civil Beat report, this Kauai property, funded primarily through Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and state financing, was being developed in the vicinity of another group of affordable housing homes constructed seventeen years earlier. As these single-family homes aged out of the fifteen-year LIHTC compliance period, they have become eligible for market-rate transactions.
As such, “despite the two developments’ similar origin stories,” owners who have purchased the now market-rate properties have been the most vocal opponents to the newer development, protesting that the newer, multistory affordable apartments would “block their ocean view” and have a “negative effect” on their home values.
Are these reasons enough to make the building go up in flames so that lower-income…
