St. Louis is on track to underfund the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund for the sixth straight year, despite a $5 million minimum annual allocation voters passed in 2002.
The mayor’s office says it’s about making tough choices with limited resources that has led the city to put on average only about $4.5 million into the fund annually. The city hasn’t allocated $5 million or more to the fund since the 2011 fiscal year, according to annual public reports released by the Affordable Housing Commission.
“This isn’t a matter of not wanting to put more money in affordable housing,” new Mayor Lyda Krewson said by phone last week. “It’s just a matter of what would we cut in order to do that. We’ve got a whole city to run and not necessarily enough money to do that.”
Krewson’s statement comes a month after voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase for public transit that triggered a corresponding increase in the funding source for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund: a business use tax on out-of-state purchases over $2,000.
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That new revenue source, projected at $4 million annually, was going to fund a new soccer stadium downtown before voters killed that proposal in the same April 4 election. Krewson said the city expected only about $2.3 million to be collected this year, and she previously said she was looking to put much of it toward public safety.
The business use tax generated $29.2 million in 2016, according to the city budget office. About $4.5 million went to affordable housing, $5 million went to the city’s Health Care Trust Fund, $1 million for building demolition and $18.6 million went into the Excess Use Tax Trust, which primarily funds public safety and neighborhood projects.
With millions in new revenue from the same funding source becoming available, activists say it makes sense to put a minimum $5 million toward the fund, which subsidizes rent and utilities as well as construction and stabilization projects.
“It does come down to priorities,” said Karl Guenther, who works at the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and the nonprofit alliance Community Builders Network. “We’ve just been on a slow slide for these housing dollars to be whittled away.”
Advocates also say it’s undermining the will of voters, if not against the law, to not fully fund the Affordable Trust Fund. The city says annual budget ordinances passed by the Board of Aldermen supersede previous ordinances, including the 2002 law requiring a minimum of $5 million annually for the fund.
When asked by a reporter, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office said staff would look into the issue but did not have a response by deadline Friday.
The fund was also mentioned in the Forward Through Ferguson report drafted by a governor-appointed commission to address inequality in the region after civil unrest in Ferguson. In 2015, commissioners said minimum funding for affordable housing should be more than $5 million, although the report doesn’t include a recommended minimum increase.
Commission leaders did not return calls last week.
April Ford Griffin, executive director of the Affordable Housing Commission, said she would not comment for this story before first asking the mayor’s permission. Griffin did not follow up with the newspaper.
Funding is allocated by the Affordable Housing Commission generally as leverage for nonprofits to secure additional funding such as grants or low interest loans. Services include building new homes, repairing and modifying homes for people with disabilities, and for rent, mortgage and utilities subsidies.
Though the ordinance allocates $5 million minimum annually for affordable housing, Krewson said that was not necessarily what voters were deciding when they approved it. The summary of the ordinance on the ballot in 2002 didn’t say how much money was going to certain funds, just what the funds would go to: affordable housing, demolitions, public safety and neighborhood preservation.
“What people voted on never said we’re going to spend $5 million per year on affordable housing,” Krewson said.
Krewson also said the proposed 2018 fiscal year budget put funding slightly over $5 million for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, but that’s including about $350,000 from the previous year’s budget that wouldn’t be spent until later.
Advocates say Krewson’s answers are political.
“I don’t think that’s what the voters expected,” said Glenn Burleigh, a community engagement specialist with the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council. “Our view is the city could fund this and it’s shortsighted not to.”
Washington University assistant professor Molly Metzger, chairwoman of the Brown School’s social and economic development concentration, said funding for housing had implications for the city’s biggest priority, public safety, as well as student success rates in public schools.
“You have kids who are unstably housed, bouncing between schools, exposed to lead, and all of these things create an environment that’s really unstable and leads to more crime taking place,” Metzger said.
The St. Louis Board of Estimate and Apportionment has approved the preliminary budget for fiscal year 2018, and it now awaits approval in the Aldermanic Ways and Means Committee before going to the full Board of Aldermen. The board has to approve a budget before July 1, the day the new fiscal year begins.