Having won income-restricted unit requirements for development near the city's transit corridor and its tallest Foundry Row towers piece by piece, Council Member Aisha Muhammad is now asking her colleagues for something bigger: a single affordable-housing mandate covering every new residential project in Bellwater, regardless of location.
Muhammad’s proposal would set a flat 15 percent income-restricted unit requirement on any residential development of 10 units or more anywhere in the city, replacing the current system in which the requirement only applies within a quarter-mile of the city’s new rapid-bus corridor or to Foundry Row towers built above the district’s recently adopted 12-story height limit. “We’ve built this policy one exception at a time,” Muhammad said. “I think it’s time to ask whether the exception should just be the rule.”
Muhammad, who chairs the council’s housing committee, argued the piecemeal approach has left large parts of the city, including new construction in West Bellwater and along Vale Avenue’s edges, exempt from any affordability requirement at all. “A family priced out of Foundry Row shouldn’t discover that the next neighborhood over has no rules whatsoever,” she said. “That’s not a housing policy. That’s a loophole with a zip code.”
Developers warn of a chilling effect
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, told the council a blanket mandate risked discouraging the kind of housing construction the city needs most. “Every project we’ve built so far has absorbed these requirements because they were targeted to specific high-value locations,” Nakamura said. “Apply the same math to a modest 12-unit building in a less lucrative part of town, and that project may simply never get built at all.”
Aaron Kessler, spokesman for Millrace Development Partners, went further, arguing the company’s experience with its ongoing lawsuit over the Foundry District Lofts’ affordable-unit commitments showed how quickly good intentions in housing policy can turn into years of litigation. “Before this council writes a citywide mandate, I’d ask it to look hard at how the current, narrower rules have actually played out in court,” Kessler said. “More rules without more clarity just means more lawsuits.”
I’ve heard the warning that this will scare off development for three separate housing votes now, and each time, developers built anyway, because Bellwater is still a good place to build. I’m done being told to wait for a slowdown that keeps not arriving while families keep getting priced out in the meantime.
Aisha Muhammad, City Council Member, District 3 (Riverside Heights)
A council still finding consensus
Council Member Terrence Boudreaux said he supported the concept but wanted the mandate paired with anti-displacement protections for existing Lowertown residents, not just requirements on new construction. “A citywide mandate on new buildings doesn’t help the family already living in a building that gets sold and renovated out from under them,” Boudreaux said. “I want both problems addressed in the same ordinance, not the second one punted to some future council.”
Council Member Denise Okafor, representing West Bellwater, said she was open to the idea but worried about its effect on the manufacturing park expansion planned near the community college’s second campus, where new worker housing has been discussed informally. “I don’t want a policy meant to protect Lowertown and Foundry Row to accidentally choke off housing my district actually needs built,” Okafor said.
Council President Walter Kowalczyk did not take a position Tuesday but asked the planning department to model the financial impact of a citywide mandate on several recent projects, comparing what they would have looked like under the current targeted rules versus Muhammad’s proposal. “I want numbers before I want a floor vote,” Kowalczyk said. “This is too consequential to decide on principle alone.”
Planning Director Renee Castillo said her department would return with that analysis within two months. Muhammad said she was prepared to negotiate on the specific percentage or unit threshold but not on the core idea of a citywide standard. “I’ll compromise on the number,” she said. “I won’t compromise on the idea that every neighborhood in this city plays by the same rules.”
Council Member Luis Bettencourt, whose Foundry Row district has absorbed the bulk of the city’s targeted affordability rules so far, said he was sympathetic to arguments on both sides. “My district has carried this policy alone for a while now,” Bettencourt said. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for other neighborhoods to share that responsibility, but I also understand why a small builder in West Bellwater might feel like he’s being punished for problems he didn’t create.” He said he had not decided how he would vote if the proposal came to the floor in its current form.
Council Member Patricia Yoon said she wanted the analysis to also examine whether a citywide mandate could be phased in gradually rather than taking effect all at once, giving smaller builders time to adjust their financing models. “I don’t want to see this framed as all or nothing,” Yoon said. “There might be a version of this that gets us to the same destination without shocking the smaller projects that keep Vale Avenue’s side streets from sitting vacant.”