
A contradictory headline describes the dilemma of the City Council in Bristol, which is trying to move quickly to provide affordable housing for their community. The need may be urgent, but approvals must jump through regulatory hoops to piece land together, hold hearings, satisfy historic and archaeological concerns, and create site plans, all in partnership with a private developer.
How to speed up the process?
At the 11th hour, the developer partners can and do claim that their contribution to the ‘affordable’ portion of the project is no longer viable, thanks to a loophole in the regulations governing public/private partnerships, which are partly subsidized by public money.
The remedy is a viability hearing, which takes up even more time. When the developer reveals the truth about its earlier budget projections, council finds itself building a project that contains only a fraction of the originally proposed affordable housing.
Bristol hopes to at least temporarily fix this and other project delays by cutting the minimum mandated affordable housing in half. The quid pro quo will be a streamlined process that will deliver less housing, but more rapidly.
Read more about how Bristol City Council hopes to mitigate some of its affordable housing woes in the Bristol Post: Bristol City Council halves affordable housing requirement for new developments – to encourage more affordable housing