If commissioners agree that short-term rentals are contributing to the lack of affordable housing, that might be the only thing they agree on as far as housing policy.
Based on discussions among commissioners at the Sept. 12 work session and Sept. 19 agenda-setting meeting, it’s unclear whether the commission will accept the recommendations of two studies on affordable housing and homelessness at its Oct. 3 voting meeting. While it’s not uncommon for the commission to vote to accept a study, then quietly let it languish on a shelf, rarely have commissioners openly expressed such reticence toward consultants’ reports.
Commissioner Ovita Thornton said she did not support the homelessness study to begin with and that it didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. Like several other commissioners, she was also concerned that spending more money to address homelessness will only attract more homeless people to Athens.
Commissioner John Culpepper also lamented that the study did not say how to prevent homeless people from coming to Athens. He called for “barriers” to prevent them from entering the county.
“We talk about people coming to our community, and they keep coming in,” Commissioner Dexter Fisher said. “How do we police that? I don’t want Athens to be the place where everybody feels that they can come and get resources.”
There is a long history in the South of “sundown towns”—communities where visitors, particularly African Americans, could find themselves arrested or worse after dark. Almost two-thirds of Athens’ homeless residents are Black, and just a few dozen had lived in Athens less than six months, according to the Cloudburst study. “I’d think we’d need to be very careful about arresting a stranger in town,” ACC Manager Blaine Williams said.
Commissioner Jesse Houle, who has experienced homelessness before, pleaded with colleagues to do something about the problem. Even if the study includes nothing new, “what would be new for this body is to act on those recommendations,” Houle said.
An annual point-in-time count found 342 people living in shelters or on the streets this year, up from 283 in 2022 and 210 in 2020 (a count wasn’t conducted in 2021 due to COVID). Of those, 28% were children, and 18% were over 55. Statewide data for 2023 wasn’t available, but in recent years similar counts in other cities have found more than 10,000 homeless individuals throughout Georgia.
The study does not offer an explanation for the spike in homelessness, other than to note that, as the largest city in the region, it is a “hub” for federally funded services that smaller communities don’t provide. The cost of housing likely has something to do with it as well, as the related affordable housing study details. The study, by consultants HR&A, found a significant gap between the average rent and mortgage payment, and what the average family can afford to pay under federal guidelines. That’s partially because not enough housing is being built to keep up with demand, and what housing is built is more profitable to rent to college students.
HR&A recommended that ACC contribute $3.3 million a year to an affordable housing fund, on top of the $1.7 million the county receives annually from the federal government. That money could be used to subsidize housing construction, serve as gap financing for public-private partnerships, help with down payments, repair aging homes for low-income residents, or buy existing affordable rental properties and keep them that way. Other recommendations include zoning changes that would bring down prices by making denser housing easier to build and incentives for developers to build below-market-rate housing.
The homelessness study, meanwhile, recommends that $5 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds the commission has already set aside for that purpose be spent on staffing up the existing Homeless Coalition of nonprofit service providers, beef up street outreach and create more shelter beds, possibly by buying a motel. Once that ARPA funding has run out, though, local taxpayers would have to take up the slack. Time is of the essence—it must be allocated by the end of next year and spent by the end of 2026.
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