Columbia is building new houses on these longtime vacant lots. Who are they for?
Residents in a historic Columbia neighborhood are finally going to see new houses go up where for years there have been vacant lots.
Four new cottages will soon fill the gaps on the 2300 block of Pendleton Street in Columbia’s historic Lower Waverly/Martin Luther King neighborhood. But the houses aren’t available to just anyone looking to buy.
The new homes, designed to match the historic character of the rest of the neighborhood, are being built specifically with first-time homebuyers and young families in mind. And the city of Columbia, using federal dollars the city administers, is paying the bill.
The city is providing $2.2 million from the federal HOME Investment Partnership Program to build the four houses in the neighborhood, and another five houses in the Jones McDonald Community Club neighborhood near Two Notch Road.
The city’s nonprofit collaborator TN Development Corporation will build the houses and, along with the city’s community development department, will help prospective buyers get low-interest mortgages. City leaders broke ground on the Pendleton Street houses Wednesday and plan to break ground on the next set of houses next week.
The new homes underscore a need residents here have been raising for years: They say the area needs more people willing to live in the community for the long haul, not just renters who leave at the end of a school semester.
But at the same time the city is helping build new single-family homes, rental developments are also continuing to mount.
“This is two-fold,” explained Bambi Gaddist, a longtime Martin Luther King resident and community representative.
“One of the things we know is lacking is affordable housing for families,” Gaddist told The State. The new houses being built by the city help address a need, but at the same time, she said residents remain concerned about out-of-state developers encroaching into their community to flip old houses into rentals and to build new muti-unit projects like the duplexes actively being erected on Cherry Street.
Lower Waverly/Martin Luther King is also a historic Black neighborhood in Columbia, having at one time been a nearly self-contained community of Black businesses, religious leaders, school teachers, barbers, tailors and more.
“Most of the houses have been in families for generations,” explained MLK neighborhood president Vivian Clark-James. But many of those houses have now been lost to developers or investors, she added.
She described the current development cycle as a catch-22: New rental housing and pervasive vacant lots both come with their own sets of problems.
Clark stressed that she is not opposed to rental properties, but she and others in her community want to maintain a balance of families, too. This new project led by the city is helping move the needle back to single-family, Clark and Gaddist both said.
Mayor Daniel Rickenmann touched on these issues as well in his remarks during the groundbreaking ceremony.
“We have less than 46% homeownership in our community,” Rickenmann said of Columbia as a whole, adding that the city needs to increase that number to more than 50%. “But we also have to recognize that we need different types of housing today.”
Rickenmann has frequently talked about improving housing density in Columbia, particularly downtown, to address a shortage of 16,000 units the city is estimated to need to meet demand in coming years.
On Wednesday, the mayor again said those types of projects that can fit more people are necessary to grow the city, but he also asked, “Where are those appropriate?”
The city is currently looking for residents who qualify to become owners of the new homes. Those interested can contact the city’s community development department at 803-545-3373. More new houses are also being planned for vacant lots in the Belmont community and the Booker Washington Heights neighborhood. More details about those plans are forthcoming, city leaders have said.
