Rob Fossi and his team at Enterprise Community Development finally broke ground last year on Roslyn Rise in Columbia.
There is still work to be done on the 153-unit mixed-income housing development. But Fossi said the hardest part was trying to cobble together the financing necessary for the large project. He’s seen many other projects fail because developers couldn’t get the money — often a combination of bank loans, government tax credits and other funds — to build affordable housing. He decried the bottleneck preventing more affordable housing projects like Roslyn Rise and Baltimore’s Sojourner Place and Cold Spring Drive from being built.
“Those in the affordable housing field are desperate to deliver these units, the resources just aren’t there,” Fossi said.
The clock is ticking to build affordable housing needed for the 116,000 households in Baltimore classified as “severely overburdened” by housing costs, paying more than 50% of their income toward rent and utilities, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group. City officials are among those trying to ease the shortage of affordable housing with a revamped inclusionary housing ordinance that would focus on getting affordable housing projects funded. The legislation, which aims to improve upon ineffective 2017 legislation, was aired before the City Council at a public hearing on Feb. 13.
