LITTLE ROCK — Wherever the Little Rock Technology Park is built, a group of volunteers said Tuesday that it plans to help secure “affordable and decent housing” to surround it.
The Little Rock Technology Park Authority Board subcommittee on community housing met for the first time Tuesday at the Willie L. Hinton Resource Center to discuss the mission of the subcommittee and organize responsibilities for the members.
The technology park board formed the committee in response to a call from University of Arkansas at Little Rock Chancellor Joel Anderson and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Chancellor Dan Rahn that the board be more inclusive with residents and find a way to improve the communities near the park. Rahn has since decided to withhold UAMS’ second installment of a total $125,000 in startup money promised to the park authority.
UALR, Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the city of Little Rock also promised $125,000 each to help form the park, whose aim is to secure private investment to further develop research at the city’s universities and research hospitals. The city also promised an additional $22 million from the new citywide sales tax that voters approved last year.
The subcommittee, of which technology park board member C.J. Duvall is chairman, will gather information about housing options as a kind of clearinghouse for the community. Board members hope that the subcommittee will be a sign of good faith to UAMS and the authority’s other partners that they plan to better involve the community.
“We’re going to be charged with finding ways to provide information and sources of assistance to residents who may be affected to find equal or better housing options if a site is selected that triggers relocation,” Duvall said.
“We’re going to try to make sure the tech park provides a sense of community to Little Rock. We want to have further site development around the tech park wherever it’s located, that would invite neighborhoods to grow around the vicinity of the tech park.”
About a dozen residents of Fair Park, Forest Hills and Oak Forest neighborhoods — the three residential sites initially studied for the technology park’s location — attended the meeting.
At the behest of a city Board of Directors’ ordinance, Mary Good, the chairman of the tech park board, had said her board would take those three sites off the table unless there was substantial neighborhood interest in locating the park there. The authority board then opened up the search to alternative site suggestions, which are due by Aug. 31.
Good said at the meeting Tuesday that the board would need to vet the suggestions and likely wouldn’t choose a final site until the end of the year.
Several residents who attended the meeting Tuesday said they were unconvinced that the board planned to locate in a nonresidential site. Anika Whitfield, a resident who has been a vocal critic of the technology park’s choice to target residential neighborhoods in the first round of its site selection, asked the subcommittee members to say whether they each favored locating the site in a residential neighborhood.
Several board members — who include neighborhood association representatives, and representatives from community housing resources such as the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, Better Community Developers, Habitat for Humanity and the University District initiative — said the question was inappropriate because it would cause division in the group early on.
“I have a very difficult time accepting how you cannot see the connection of this committee’s mission to whether people get displaced from their homes,” Whitfield said. “Resources are great, information is great. But why are we looking for that information? Are we looking for it because we plan to displace people from their homes? It matters, and it presents two very different agendas.”
Other residents said they were concerned that the subcommittee was considering only housing options that were subsidized and aimed at a very specific subset of residents, while many others wouldn’t be eligible because of their credit, incomes or a long wait-list for some subsidized opportunities.
“The things I see missing is a discussion of rental housing and other options that are not subsidized,” said Cathy Watkins, a housing counselor in Little Rock. “There are long waiting lines for many of the programs you’re talking about, and for the others, it may take months or years of housing and credit counseling. We’re not talking about people who will be ready to jump into home ownership without a few years of help.”
Little Rock Ward 2 Director Ken Richardson said he had doubts about whether the subcommittee was a true community effort because its recommendations would not be binding and would be limited to only certain aspects of the technology park.
Richardson said he hopes the subcommittee can expand its mission to include building a better community beyond housing, regardless of what location is chosen.
“This may be a bigger task than what you guys are assigned to, in terms of housing being only one piece of what needs to be done,” he said. “I hope you can look at it from a bigger perspective of system reforms. This is a food desert ... look at the concentration of convenience stores and stores that sell alcohol. We need to figure out a way to tie these pieces together ... infrastructure, housing and human capital investment.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 07/25/2012