Transforming city-owned land
For now, there aren’t a lot of concrete details when it comes to what the administration has planned for the first year of H.O.M.E.
More generally, the administration wants to use the first bond issuance to keep existing programs funded and going strong. The list includes the Basic Systems Repair Program, as well as Turn the Key, which Parker has vowed to put “on steroids” under the initiative. The building program is aimed at minting first-time homeowners, especially city workers.
“The prime concentration there is to make sure that we don’t lose the momentum,” said Jessie Lawrence, who directs the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
The administration will also focus on getting more public parcels ready for redevelopment. That primarily involves fast-tracking the disposal of 1,000 city-owned parcels.
City Council passed legislation in January containing language meant to streamline the approvals process for these parcels — so they can be sold to developers more quickly. This will be accomplished by creating a preapproved list of properties that will not require new legislation to be introduced by a district council member, who typically have final say on land-use decisions in the communities they serve through the tradition of councilmanic prerogative.
During the first year of H.O.M.E., Lawrence said the goal is to operationalize that process and get these parcels in the pipeline for disposition and redevelopment.
“Being able to say that our special disposition plan came to fruition, mobilized and actually achieved the goals that we were looking for,” he said.
It’s unclear how many of these projects will be under construction during the first phase of H.O.M.E. — or how many units the administration expects to add to its running total.
Overall, the plan calls for the construction of 13,500 new homes and the preservation of 16,500 more, a split housing experts say is achievable.
During the first two years of Parker’s term, 3,525 new units were built and 8,593 were preserved under H.O.M.E., according to data the administration shared with WHYY News.
“I’d stay tuned,” Lawrence said, “because we got some things in the works that are really going to allow us to be able to point to these numbers much more sophisticatedly than we can right now. There’ll be some dashboards available that will really allow us to kind of speak to some targets in an itemized way.”