PHOENIX — To help address the shortage in affordable housing, the city of Phoenix is putting up some of its own property to help.
The city has identified eight lots of land in Sunnyslope to be sold in two packages, one located near 4th Street and Dunlap Avenue, which is zoned for apartments, condos, and single-family homes. The other is located on 3rd Street and Dunlap Avenue, which is zoned commercial.
The properties are appraised at $625,000 and $470,000 respectively and is part of a broader strategy to incentivize private contractors to help tackle the need for affordable housing.
"We're trying to provide incentives so new private sector landlords will come online and we're trying to put up city property for affordable housing development,” Mayor Kate Gallego told ABC15.
The Housing Phoenix Plan (HPP) was adopted by the city council in June 2020 and identifies housing needs in the community — setting a goal of creating or preserving 50,000 homes by 2030. It also adopted nine policy initiatives to explore, three of which are focused on the redevelopment of city-owned land with mixed-income housing; the mayor and city council approved a list of city-owned land parcels, including the two sites currently up for sale.
"So again, incentivize as much as possible. We've cut some red tape to make it easier. If you want to build a backyard casita for additional housing. And we even did a contest with our great architects to come up with free plans to help people do that. So, we're really trying to be creative and nimble about solutions,” Gallego said.
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But the Mayor pointed to the state legislature for hampering the progress made by the city in creating more housing options.
"For example, we passed a model policy to help people build backyard casitas, and then we required people to use it for housing and not party houses and short-term rentals,” Gallego said. "The legislature then preempted us and said, you can have party houses. So that took a policy that was meant to encourage housing and weakened it.”
She hopes to have a better dialogue with both Governor Katie Hobbs and members of the state legislature to help achieve a common goal of developing more affordable housing options.
"Phoenix has gotten national recognition for leading the way in new apartments in our country. We're building, we're delivering. We're creating great homes. So often the legislature carves out the communities that are not contributing to the solution as much and really focuses on the big cities. We could house more people if it was all-hands-on-deck and everyone going in the same direction,” Gallego said.
