Minvilla is a marriage of historic preservation and affordable housing. Some people think that’s a bad marriage, because the cost is too high. Just last Monday, for example, several Knox County Commissioners raised the issue of per-unit cost, saying that ~$123,000 per unit is an outrageous amount of money to spend to rehabilitate a building [...]
Last Wednesday’s News-Sentinel published this article about City Council’s approval of Neighborhood Stabilization Fund (NSP) dollars for Minvilla. The article contained this:
Jon Lawler, director of the city-county 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, said 80 percent of the public funds secured for Minvilla, including historic and low-income housing tax credits, are specific to that project.
Several [...]
People sometimes ask us, “Why not take this money and spend it to purchase already-existing apartments and other properties and turn them into PSH developments? This would certainly be cheaper, and we could house more people faster this way. Why don’t we abandon Minvilla and do PSH somewhere else?”
These are fair questions. Minvilla is expensive [...]