Hello neighbor, There is a public hearing coming up on April 7th at 6pm at the downtown city hall annex building at 900/901 Bagby in downtown Houston regarding a proposed low income apartment complex at our neighborhood entrance. I hope we can all get organized and voice our opinions regarding the proposed project to the people in the attached letter put together by Jacob and Rebbeca. Thanks to our neighbors for bringing this important issue to our attention. See their letter attached at the following link
This issue has been taken up by the City of Katy Mayor and it made the abc13 News Wednesday Night. See the video by following the link below!
Katy says 'no thanks' to housing project.
Keep in mind the issues that will be important to each official that you contact so that we can motivate them to take action.
For example we should hit home with the school district that West Memorial Elementary and Jr High already have a huge base of transient apartments complexes and motels within their boundaries and adding another would be detrimental to the schools ability to teach our children effectively due to the high student turnover low income apartments would make even worse. We and they don't want WME and the JR high to lose their recognized status and we need neighborhoods that are able to support our students and teachers to become Exemplary schools. Additionally, West Memorial Elementary and Jr High have run out of space to accomodate additional students. This will lead to school boundaries bouncing around for our neighborhood. Also this type of low income housing will add additional students with little parental support for the school because these parents are busy just trying to provide for their families.
Please post your comments and ideas about how we can approach and target specific officials. Lets colloborate to make our efforts successful and efficient.
10 comments:
Katy ISD has recommended directly mailing the TDHCA. Here is the contact information:
Raquel Morales
Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs
Multifamily Finance Division
P.O. Box 13941
Austin, Texas 78711-3941
**UPDATE:
We are actually in Senator Joan Huffman's district, NOT Senator Glenn Hegar.
Here's the contact information:
Brandon Chase
Brandon.Chase@senate.state.tx.us
713-662-3821
Please pass this information on to your neighbors.
Alta Harbor, 200 units in 8 buidlings that a one bedroon rents for $565 dollars a month and you can make no more the $29,460 combined household income to qualify to live in oh and the best part is that it is gated!!!! Those of us who have spent 100's of $1000's of dollars for our home can't get our community gated, but... the Section 8 development can!!!!I would not have a problem if this was targeted towards seniors or the disabled, but they are actually excluded. Please see the attached link for the full information on the project. http://www1.tdhca.state.tx.us/htc/2010preapps/10197.pdf
Do you really want this in our neighborhood. Don't let the Wood Partners flashy website fool you, the residents of their other Section 8 properties in Houston speak for themselves, murder, trash, burgulary, muggings and those other properties rent on average for $130.00 month more than the proposed Alta Harbor. Please read for yourself
http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate/TX-Houston-Alta-Gardens.html
Who is going to pay for the $2 million in tax credits that the developer is requesting from the TDHCA? We will. Our property values will suffer, our parks will suffer and our community will suffer. Make sure to point out the lackluster response times of police and emergancy services to our neighborhood due to the confusion over jurisdiction because we sit on the county line. Will the good people, being good neighbors in this new community b served by a failure to control crime?
Oh and my favorite part of the application is where they check off that they recieved no response from their notification to our homeowners organization and our school district.
I find it interesting that they selected this location. There is inadequate public transportation and other services you would think would be desirable for their target demographic. Even more interesting is that the proposed site is outside of both the City of Katy and City of Houston. My bet is that was done purposely so as to avoid certain building code issues, permitting and the associated inspections that would be required. I will be in attendance next week.
The developer is on the Agenda of the City of Houston Council meeting tomorrow afternoon at 1:30pm seeking the a resolution of endorsement for our proposed property and another in the Copperfield area at Hwy 6 ann 290.
I have written to all the City Council members requesting that they vote down this issue. you can contact them at http://www.houstontx.gov/council/index.html
Scroll down the page for each members info.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7364801
Good news!
Harpreet posted a link to the story about the application for the apartments being withdrawn. Please spread this news around to your neighbors if possible. My husband and I are still planning to attend the meeting tomorrow to make sure that there's no mention of the application, and also to let any Grand Harbor residents who may not have heard the news know about it. But I would hate for people to make arrangements to take off work early or to drive all the way to downtown since the application has been withdrawn. Thanks! :)
Post a Comment