Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly and Chief Housing Officer Nicole Heyman unveiled the City’s first-ever Housing Action Plan: A comprehensive policy and program toolkit to address Chattanooga’s affordable housing challenges and to advance the administration’s housing affordability goals.
“Chattanooga has faced a sizable deficit of affordable housing units for years. When I took office, I challenged my team to think big about ways to solve this problem, and we have taken historic action to date” said Mayor Tim Kelly.
“Now is our chance to double down on the effort and make sure we address the problem in a persistent way. Our recent market analysis shows that without additional action, Chattanooga could see a deficit of 7,000 affordable housing units by 2030. That means 7,000 working families – our teachers, police officers, firefighters, or folks in the hospitality industry – simply won’t be able to afford to live in our city, and that is flatly unacceptable. This is why we must have a robust Housing Action Plan.”
The Housing Action Plan is the culmination of six months of intensive market research and analyses of our city’s current housing needs. It was prepared in collaboration with The City of Chattanooga and HR&A Advisors, an urban development consulting firm made up of experts in the field of housing and economic development. The plan provides a set of actionable policy and programmatic recommendations to preserve existing affordable rental units, to expand Chattanooga’s affordable housing inventory by bringing new units online, and to create new pathways to homeownership for people for whom homeownership is currently out of reach.
“I came to work for the City of Chattanooga because I believe in the vision that Mayor Kelly has and the actions his administration has taken to make affordable housing accessible for all Chattanoogans,” said Chief Housing Officer Nicole Heyman. “We now have a clear picture of what the affordable housing needs are and a comprehensive guide for how we can address those needs. The good news is that we are already doing a number of the things outlined in the plan, many are in the planning phase, and I’m excited for the opportunity to build on that momentum by implementing the additional opportunities to improve the housing ecosystem across our city.”
The Housing Action Plan lays out a series of policy recommendations and suggestions to guide the City of Chattanooga in the creation and preservation of quality, affordable housing units. The plan is centered around five key goals that respond to the current state of Chattanooga’s housing market:
- Build the Housing Ecosystem. All housing policies necessarily involve public-private cooperation and partnership. Chattanooga can only address its housing challenges if its capacity and the capacity of its partners is at a scale equal to the challenge it faces.
- Increase the number of affordable, quality, rental homes. The decline in the number of affordable rental homes must be reversed to achieve the City’s vision for its housing market and to support equitable prosperity.
- Expand access to homeownership and protect existing homeowners. Until recently, Chattanooga was a city where the American Dream was accessible to households earning the median income, and it must be again to build community wealth.
- Work to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. To address homelessness, the City must create systemic change that will reduce housing instability by aligning investments in affordable housing and supportive service delivery.
- Move towards equitable housing for all Chattanoogans. Closing racial and other inequities in Chattanooga’s housing market must be a component of all the housing policies it adopts.
Chief Housing Officer Nicole Heyman’s presentation to the Chattanooga City Council’s Affordable Housing Committee can be found here.