In my last post I noted the Oil City Derrick’s article on the Venango County Housing study conducted by CZB.
Thanks to Joan Wheeler for clueing me in, here is a link where the full report can be found: http://czb.org/worksamples.html
I urge everyone concerned about our neighborhoods and our future as a community to read it. The study conducted by the consulting firm CZB contains some hard truths. I suspect many of us instinctively knew or at least had a suspicion of some of the things that CZB found and made crystal clear in its report, including that cheap, substandard housing leads to further decline.
Some of the suggested solutions to our housing problems are going to draw fire, notably the call for rental unit registration and inspection. On at least two prior occasions when that was brought up in Oil City it met with a firestorm of criticism from landlords and obviously failed to go anywhere.
The consultants also called for strict and aggressive building code and property maintenance enforcement. Again, this is not going to be popular with everyone, but in my mind is absolutely necessary if we are going to save our neighborhoods and our community.
The report also clearly indicates we have way more housing than we need, especially of the cheap and substandard kind. This is not good for Oil City, or the county as a whole. The report suggests that we move to demolish the worst of that. Council has long recognized the need to demolish our condemned and abandoned houses, but as with all things, is constrained financially.
Getting our housing market right is necessary to preserve our neighborhoods. Preserving neighborhoods is necessary for economic development.
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The county's housing study will be presented March 17th at 6 p.m. at the Oil City Library.
There's a lot of information about Oil City, as well as the county as a whole.
Please plan on attending.
From today's (03/13) Derrick:
At 19 percent, Oil City's poverty rate exceeds the county average by 52 percent, the study notes.
More:
"A culture of poverty" has taken root in the county, the study argues, and it indicates that if leaders take nothing else away from the study, they should heed the observation that "jobs and job-readiness are a greater challenge than housing."
The job-readiness problem is not simply a factor of lack of education and skills.
Rather, "there is a serious drug and alcohol problem in the county, one that thwarts employment," according to the study.
Households unable to secure housing in the county's extremely affordable market pose "not a housing problem" but a "work-readiness challenge."
The stories in the paper over the last couple of days have been helpful.
I hope a lot of people turn out on the 17th to hear more.
The study's comments on drug and alcohol issues and job readiness are interesting.
The consultants also mentioned the problem of tenants who have drug and alcohol problems that interfere with their ability or desire to hold a job. The consultants also suggested that all tenants get classes in their responsibilities, like paying the rent on time every month.
The consultants also said that housing conditions are a derivative of the need for higher-wage jobs. Council needs to work on this.
More from the report:
We predict however that the temptation will be great to address market weakness on one
hand, and a"ordability challenges for the poor on the other, in the same manner as has been tried in
the past. We predict that the temptation will come in the form of an argument that it is possible to
build the County out of its weak housing situation: to build senior housing for the elderly who want to
leave their current homes, and to build a"ordable housing for low-income families who cannot
penetrate the market without subsidy.
My take on the issue of tenants with drug and alcohol problems that interfere with their abilities ... is that it goes back to the poverty of values issue. Economic poverty is not nearly as devastating to community as is a contingent that suffers from a poverty of values.
I wish I knew what more could be done to attract higher-wage jobs. There simply is no magic wand.
We are trying, although not everyone will always agree with our attempts.
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