Attainable Housing
Attainable housing is one of the larger issues that Newport has been facing over the past few years and it’s having the greatest impact on the City’s workforce and retirement community.
The crisis
People are not able to buy their first homes and start their families here. The City’s workforce, including police, fire and rescue, teachers, and hospital staff are among those individuals that are struggling to find housing that is affordable to them to rent, let alone to buy.
Our retirement community, our aging Newporters, are struggling to be able to stay in their homes on a fixed income. Many are being forced to sell their homes and move to other communities, leaving behind their families, friends, neighbors, and support systems to start over elsewhere.
Unfortunately, there isn’t just one issue that is contributing to this housing crisis, there are many.
Newport has become a top travel destination, and this has opened booming vacation rental and short-term rental ownership opportunities for many individuals who aren’t even Newport residents.
And the competitive real estate market and inflated cost of property values have made it too expensive for the working class to be able to buy homes or rent apartments.
These are just a few of the issues contributing to the housing crisis.
The impact
First time homeowners, and families aren’t able to buy a home or rent an apartment here, which is contributing to the dwindling numbers of students enrolled in the City’s public schools.
Not only have small businesses found it difficult to remain fully staffed, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and Naval Station Newport have had trouble retaining new hires who aren’t able to find an affordable place to live.
Many employees must commute into and out of the city daily, which continues to put pressure on the transportation system making streets more congested and less safe for cyclists and pedestrians. Not to mention what the constant influx of cars is doing to the City’s infrastructure and air quality.
We need to make sure that Newport is an affordable place to live year-round, and right now it isn’t.
What is being done
City Council has started to look at what is causing this crisis. Studies have been done and are still in the process of being completed, workshops have been held, consultants have been brought in to do research and analysis, and Council has partnered with our State Representatives to see what can be done at the State level to help facilitate resolutions.
However, more is required to beat this crisis. Sadly, there isn’t just one solution, it must be approached from multiple angles and will require multiple solutions.
How do we move forward?
We don’t need to recreate the wheel.
Newport isn’t the only community that is facing a housing crisis. This issue is country wide. Do we really need to be investing money in all these studies, workshops, and consultants when the research has already been done in other communities that has resulted in various resolutions?
Why not implement an Attainable Housing Commission that is comprised of homeowners, renters, business owners, and individuals that have backgrounds in real estate, taxes, and planning?
Why not utilize this commission to connect with the neighboring towns of Middletown and Portsmouth to see how they are mitigating this crisis?
What impacts us, impacts them!
As more is being done to mitigate and control non-resident and non-owner-occupied short-term rentals, why not look at multiple way in which they can provide a city with additional income through tax revenues? We’ve had a great start with increasing taxes on these properties, however, places like Mill Valley, CA requires short-term rental owners to purchase a business license, couldn’t that work here as well?
We may want to look at how cities like Henderson, NV; Fayetteville, AR; San Diego, CA; and Lake Placid, NY all found ways of decreasing the impact of short-term rentals on long term residents. They had clear policy objectives, considered racial equity, engaged their stakeholders, developed and enforced clear regulations, and provided continuous review of the city’s ordinances.
All items that an Attainable Housing Commission could accomplish, at no additional cost to the city.
And lastly, we need a plan moving forward on how to avoid this crisis in the future. It isn’t enough to just be thinking in the here and now. We NEED to be forward thinking on how this crisis could impact Newport in five, ten, and fifteen years.
We are losing our residential community, we are losing our working class, and we are seeing the gentrification of our aging residents happen before our eyes.
The time to ACT is NOW, the time to COLLABORATE is NOW, the time for CRITICAL THINKING is NOW!!