More talking about our house payments and also about a housing project that is going to be coming up near our house. Don’t jump unless that is what you are interested in.
In May of last year I posted an entry talking about how much we have paid off on our house and how quickly we had done it. I thought we were close enough to another milestone that I would post about it again. In the 16 months since I posted that we have paid off another $30,000 on the house bringing us down to about $38,000 left. In the previous post I talked about how I wasn’t sure if Julie would effect our ability to pay it off quickly or not. So far she hasn’t. We have been making the same payments that we were making before and we even managed to pay off our HHR a year earlier than GMAC expected us to. If things keep going as they have been, then it looks like in another 15 months or so we might start looking at what we need to do to finish the payments off completely.
On a somewhat related note we went to a meeting last night which talked about a new building project that is going to be started new our subdivision. A developer bought a piece of land at public auction and is planning on building 24 duplex buildings on part of it. The buildings are government assisted in that they are getting the initial building cost reduced with government money. This means that they have to have an upper limit to the income that people that live there can have. The people that live there are not rent assisted though, so they will have to make their own rent payments (over $300 a month) without any assistance.
I was a little on the fence about the project before the meeting, as I was a little worried about what the whole thing was going to end up being. There were lots of people at the meeting that were really upset about it, but for me, once he explained the rent setup I was less so. They also passed around drawings of what he buildings would look like and they seemed nice enough. They are going to be all brick, with a little vinyl siding in the peaks of the roof. They also said that they raised the roof pitch to more closely match the pitch that the houses near it had. They showed the upper limits to what people could make and still be eligible to live there and interestingly a first year teacher in any of the districts around here would qualify. the numbers were actually higher than the median income for the a family in Brownsville. The group also said that they did extensive police background checks and that anyone with a criminal record was not allowed to rent from them, and that they preferred to get elderly people in. Thinking about it later that seemed like an obviously good idea, since those are the people that you know are going to have a fairly steady income and be fairly easy to deal with.
They opened the floor to questions and it was fairly obvious that no one there was going to be civil about it. After the first accusing question, the owner of the land made it clear that this wasn’t really a discussion. He had purchased the land free and clear with no limitations, and that the county had no rules against him building the way he wanted to. He even went so far as to say that he had no plans to sell lots out of the land because once he sold one he had no way to control the people that were living there which is something he said he could do if they were just renters.
So once the questions started flying and it was obvious that people were just going to be bickering and that even if I really didn’t want it to be there, which is not the case, it wasn’t going to make any difference, I just decided to leave. I don’t know how long they stayed there afterwards, but it seemed like a waste of time to listen to well off people argue against giving less well off people a decent place to live.