Bluffton weighs mobile home conversions
Garfield Moss is proposing that the town of Bluffton team with his nonprofit housing corporation to convert substandard mobile homes into solid houses.
The Affordable Housing Committee heard Moss’ proposal last week. Chairman Fred Hamilton Jr. and some other members said they would explore the proposal to leverage town funds for low-income housing repairs.
By consensus, the mayor’s advisory committee took the Bluffton Non-Profit Housing Corp. offer under advisement.
Marc Orlando, growth management director, asked for direction and if staff should move forward.
“I think we need more time to digest it,” Hamilton said.
“I agree,” said Thomas Viljac, panel member and planning commission chairman. Hamilton said the proposal was tabled until the committee’s next meeting in March.
The partnership they are entertaining would “install a permanent cement block foundation system around the perimeter of existing mobile home trailers,” according to Moss’ proposal.
Low-income owners of the homes, after conversions at $6,700 each, would then be eligible for federally funded weatherization repairs worth $15,000, according to Moss’ offer.
Federal Home Loan Bank weatherization grant money could be used for additional repairs to roofs, windows, exterior doors, heating and air-conditioning systems, insulation, floors and other replacements.
Targeted areas for the grant work include Old Town and the areas of Goethe, Simmonsville and Buck Island roads, Moss wrote in a Jan. 20 report.
The Affordable Housing Committee’s other members include Mayor Lisa Sulka; Dee Anderson, a banker, and Councilwoman Karen Lavery.
Early support
Councilman Mike Raymond said after the meeting he was impressed by Moss’ proposal.
“I love it. It’s outside the box thinking,” Raymond said. “These are the kind of alternatives that will keep Bluffton’s affordable housing going.”
Officials recently reported the town’s Neighborhood Assistance Program, with repairs capped at $5,000 per home, had about tapped out funding for the fiscal year ending June 30. Using the general fund, the program had completed repairs to 27 homes, almost all of them stick-built houses. Four more were nearing completion, and two other applications were under review as of late January.
Town officials said they had cut off applications pending a council decision on funding for the next budget year.
Moss told the panel many trailers have been ruined by moisture and by animals getting under them, and he didn’t think the town’s $5,000 per home repair program is enough.
If the town spends $6,700 per mobile home for the foundations, and homeowners in turn get additional repair grants of $15,000, “we can make these houses liveable,” Moss said.
He said the housing project also would provide jobs to locals and could include an apprentice program for teenagers.
Bridge building
Moss, 68, ran for Town Council in 2008. He said he has 40 years experience in new construction and rehabilitation work.
He is perhaps best known locally for running an Old Town Historic District tour on his golf cart and repeatedly being denied accommodations tax funding for it.
Also, in 2006, Moss complained to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department that the town was discriminating against him by denying development proposals for property he and his wife, Nancy, own at Wharf and Lawrence Street.
But last week’s exchanges stayed positive, and no mention was made of old disagreements with former Mayor Hank Johnston and other former town officials.
For the repair program, Moss told the committee he was “just trying to give you some of the resources” he has invested in Bluffton. “We just need you to do a joint venture with us. And if you do, I think we can solve one of the problems we’ve been working on for the past eight years.”
Social cause
“A big problem we have here is we are losing most of the blacks here,” said Moss, who moved to Bluffton about 24 years ago. “We want the people to stay here. We don’t want them to leave.”
Moss said that in 1989, when Bluffton was a square mile, blacks made up half the town’s population. Annexation to 54 square miles and Bluffton’s population boom “has drastically decreased our historical racial composition,” he wrote.
“As quickly as this trend is progressing, the black population will be an extinct group of residents — particularly in Old Town Bluffton — in a few short years.”
In his report to Orlando, Moss said, “The primary group of residents we propose to target for grant funding also happens to be the diminishing group of black people who are being forced out of Bluffton because of substandard housing/condemnation and increased costs. …
“We have a duty to halt the displacement of our black population and develop programs to help them continue to live in our community, especially when there are grant funds available to accomplish this end.”
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Bluffton weighs mobile home conversions