Lexington’s always troubling housing problems are getting much worse
Affordable housing, always a heated topic in Lexington, has become positively scorching as the days until the primary election tick by.
Like cities everywhere, the uptick in housing and rental prices — the median home sale price rose to $269,422 in March — comes at the same time people are still suffering in the wake of a pandemic, but those at the lower end of the economic spectrum suffer most of all.
Take Davita Gatewood. She has lived in a house on Henry Clay Boulevard for almost five years with her four of her six children. She takes care of a special needs child; the rest of her children are in college or thriving in local high schools. This winter, her landlord, Pinnacle Properties told her they would not renew the lease because they wanted to sell the house. Like many others, they want to take advantage of a hot real estate market.
Gatewood, who has also worked as a para-educator, has a Section 8 housing voucher, which can help pay for housing anywhere she can find it. But she can’t find it. Especially not a four-bedroom space in the Frederick Douglass High School district, where she’d like her kids to stay so they can remain in the same schools. She’s tried to work with the Lexington Housing Authority, the Lexington Fair Housing Council, the Lexington Tenants Union and the city, but has to move out by the end of the school year.
“Landlords will not take Section 8, and there’s just too much demand for everything,” she said. Gatewood looked at one house where six other couples were vying to rent.
Gatewood needs a larger than normal space to live, but she’s far from being alone right now, said Art Crosby, director of the Lexington Fair Housing Council.
“Unfortunately, this situation is happening to many people and it clearly has a disparate impact on people of color, families with kids, and families with fixed incomes,” he said.
Crosby said the city did a good job in using federal COVID funding to avoid a tidal wave of evictions, and has done a better job on working with different agencies to prevent homelessness altogether.
“We have data, and we’re not just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, but there’s always limited resources,” Crosby said. “But there are still a lot of people being displaced.”
Charlie Lanter is the city’s first Commissioner of Housing Advocacy and Community Development. He’s recently gotten a new position approved known as Housing Advocate, someone who can help people like Gatewood, when they have hit a wall.
“This position will be someone a citizen can call when they’ve hit a wall in finding a unit or when they can’t figure out why they’ve been cited by housing enforcement,” he said. “Everyone’s housing needs are unique. Housing programming in this community is in kind of black box and citizens need someone to navigate it.”
For Gatewood, that navigation includes consulting with the Lexington Tenants Union, a relatively new organization that is trying to strengthen tenants’ rights.
“Unfortunately the larger systems of housing in the country at large have created conditions where there’s just not any affordable housing available,” said member and spokesman Nick Lyell. Larger changes would include limits on the amount of increases that landlords can make to properties, better protections for tenants facing evictions, and better enforcement of housing codes and protections for tenants.
Now that we’re in an election year, there’s been a lot more talk about Lexington’s housing problems, but a disappointing lack of strong, comprehensive ideas about how to solve it. For example, some community groups are pushing to open the urban service boundary for more development, while others oppose that idea and say we need to stress infill and redevelopment. But people are much less able to articulate how they would make sure that truly affordable housing is part of the mix or how to make infill and redevelopment less expensive.
None of these systemic issues will help Gatewood in the time she needs. That’s now. What she’s done in the meantime is start up a an affordable housing collective called Housing Equality All Lexington (HEAL).
“This is why I want to own a house,” she said. “Because otherwise I’m at landlords’ mercy.”
