She’s struggled to pay rent. Now this Richland councilwoman wants to help others
Before she moved to South Carolina, Richland County Councilwoman Allison Terracio lived in a cramped, overpriced apartment in New York City.
After her family spent one winter without working heat, they entered an affordable housing lottery and won a space in an apartment that was twice the size of their old unit.
“I know how much that changed my life to be able to move somewhere that was comfortable for my family and to be able to afford it,” she said.
Terracio is now leading the county council’s search for new ways to create affordable housing in Richland County.
According to data collected by U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Communities Survey, more than half of renter households in the county are classified as “cost burdened.” That means they spend more than a third of their income on rent.
The county’s most recent efforts to tackle this problem began in June when Terracio proposed that the council’s development and services committee study solutions for affordable housing.
At the end of July, the committee reviewed a report from county staff that outlined the scope of the affordable housing crisis in the county as well as the causes and barriers to change.
“There is evident need for affordable housing, where developing specific policy goals and objectives is another step forward to bring accountability to the issue,” the report read.
It proposed several options for increasing affordability including amending zoning regulations and leveraging public lands.
One recommendation was to create an affordable housing trust fund, a pool of public money offered to developers to help them fund affordable housing projects.
“So for example, developers might pay for 70% and then 30% of the money comes from a trust fund to offset their costs,” said Kalli Bunch, associate organizer at MORE Justice, a local faith-based social justice organization. “That leads to more affordable housing being built in the area.”
For the past two years, MORE Justice has been lobbying for an affordable housing trust fund in Richland County.
“We heard so many stories from people who couldn’t pay their rent or were facing eviction,” Bunch said. “From there we studied several different solutions but we really felt that a trust fund was the best way to be able to meet the needs of people in Richland County.”
But not everyone agrees.
Jeff Larimore is the executive director of the Midlands Housing Trust Fund, a non-profit that provides loans to developers of affordable housing. He said it would be difficult to find developers to participate in the kind of trust fund MORE Justice has proposed since they want to exclusively fund housing projects for people who make between 30% and 50% of the area median income.
“That becomes very challenging because you would have to find developers who are more mission driven,” he said.
Terracio said the county will continue to study a wide variety of strategies before moving forward with any concrete policy proposals.
She said the county has committed to creating an affordable housing task force and her next goal is to try to merge their efforts with a similar task force in the city of Columbia.
“I want us to be committed to getting this right and that means getting everyone involved,” she said.
