Council to take final vote Monday on north Cheyenne affordable apartments | Local News

CHEYENNE – It has been a tumultuous couple of months for a tidy suburban neighborhood in north Cheyenne.

Residents of The Bluffs started hearing about the affordable apartment complex planned for their western border near Converse Avenue in mid-spring.

They got a presentation from Summit Housing Group at Anderson Elementary School, which sits in the northwest corner of the neighborhood, not long afterward. By most accounts, things became heated pretty quickly.

“We tried to explain the project to community,” Summit senior project manager Sam Lang said. “But they just said, ‘We don’t want this.’”

A similarly passionate Cheyenne Planning Commission meeting followed July 5. Commissioners’ attempts to explain their reasoning for recommending approval of rezoning and the importance of having affordable housing in the community came off to many in the crowd of Bluffs neighbors as politically correct nonsense.

Similar concerns persisted in City Council committee meetings, though the crowds thinned. Councilman Mark Rinne still managed to fire up those in attendance when he accused residents of harboring not-in-my-backyard sentiments.

On Monday night, the City Council will take a final vote on the rezoning. The developer has met each of the city’s requirements for approval, and equivocation is the closest any council member has come to opposing the request.

But regardless of how the vote goes, the debate over a three-story, 72-unit development may offer a glimpse into how affluent areas of Cheyenne will respond to the city’s future efforts to sate a growing need for affordable housing.

Krystal Lewis wants to make clear that she is not against affordable housing.

Most everyone else who has walked up to a microphone to speak against Converse Place Apartments says that, but Lewis is so careful to separate herself from any aura of that, she once referred to her testimony as “informational,” rather than “in opposition” or “against.”

Lewis’ qualifier is her first year out of college in a Queens, New York, flat with 10 other people. It had one bathroom. She emphasizes that no one should have to live like that.

And while some of the points she makes in her PowerPoint presentation have changed from meeting to meeting, the core message has stayed the same: The field east of Converse between Dell Range and Storey boulevards is the wrong place for Summit’s project.

She’s cautious about how she phrases that message, but she’s clear about why.

“It doesn’t fit the character of the neighborhood that’s already here,” she said.

Some of Lewis’ neighbors also make their opposition clear, but in different ways.

Stephen Van Court, who lives down the street from Lewis, expressed at a July 31 town hall meeting his annoyance at having to drive by the apartments already massed at the southern edge of the neighborhood.

Gloria Bruner and her husband, Gerald, told members of the City Council’s Public Services Committee that they had worked hard for their money and their home on Point Bluff Road. They said they felt like they should be left alone and not have affordable housing encroaching on their golden years.

Jim Wade, a resident of Plainview Road, said at a July 24 council meeting, “This area is turning into another south side (of Cheyenne). When I was a kid, that was the wrong side of the tracks.”

Lewis is worried about her property value’s potential decline, but submits things would be much easier if the developer had simply made the apartments single-story.

“I doubt anyone in the neighborhood would have even noticed,” she said.

And if Summit Housing were making all of its units accessible to disabled residents instead of just a few of them, she says she might have dropped her opposition altogether.

Those weren’t her only concerns, though.

Her presentation, which she said was partially prepared by another person, has at least some of the familiar concerns councilmen like Rinne see as unfounded. There are predictions that the development will increase crime in the area and overcrowd the neighborhood elementary school.

Police data provided to Summit Housing and Rinne, in addition to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, suggests Summit’s existing properties in south Cheyenne are not plagued by abnormal levels of crime.

And enrollment estimates for Anderson Elementary from Laramie County School District 1 cast doubt on the idea that the development would lead to overflowing classrooms.

Regardless of the outcome, Lewis said the process has taught her a lot about how Cheyenne’s politics work, which has made her want to get more involved.

She won’t be moving away, and she won’t necessarily be voting against Rinne if he seeks re-election next year.

“I’ll definitely be paying more attention,” she said.

Her neighbor, Lela Ladd, who lives with her retired police officer husband, James, down Plainview Road, has a different take.

“I’m thinking, ‘Do I want to stay in this house?’” she said.

Ladd wants to know how she can possibly not worry about her home’s value, especially after reading a study that created buzz in the national media earlier this summer.

The research, published recently by Stanford University economists, found that while affordable housing developments in neighborhoods where median incomes were below $26,000 per year raised nearby property values by 6.5 percent, the opposite was true in wealthier neighborhoods.

In neighborhoods where median income topped $54,000, property values near affordable units dropped about 2.5 percent, according to the study.

That could lead to residents fleeing a neighborhood that’s remained solid despite the presence of other apartments to the south, she said.

The issue for the City Council, though, is that it has to square the neighborhood’s concerns with a desperate need for affordable housing in Cheyenne.

Through the end of July, there were 1,593 households waiting for a federal Section 8 voucher to help pay rent, said Cheyenne Housing Authority Executive Director Greg Hancock. Slightly more than 1,000 households are on the public housing waiting list.

“There’s not enough (affordable housing),” he said. “Our waiting list is evidence of that. And a lot of these people are working jobs in retail or other things; they just don’t make enough to pay for market-rate housing.”

Lang has trumpeted his intention to fill his apartments with at least a dozen or so airmen from nearby F.E. Warren Air Force Base. He also has reached out to Walmart in hopes of getting some applications from people working at the distribution center – the exact kind of people to whom Hancock is referring.

And James Brooks, who studies ways to improve cities at the nonprofit National League of Cities, said research also shows moving people from low-income neighborhoods to middle-income neighborhoods can be enormously beneficial.

“There’s a work ethic and sense of neighborhood pride that gets transmitted,” he said. “There are better opportunities in schools and with jobs … they thrive.”

But that may never convince residents already in place.

In an interview with the Washington Post, one of the Stanford study authors, Rebecca Diamond, suggested Ladd’s fears for the future of her neighborhood may be more than conjecture.

“People have a preference of who their neighbors are, and perhaps higher-income people just don’t want to live with lower-income residents,” she told the Post.

Rinne is one of a few council members who have indicated they’ll vote to approve the rezoning request, even if it means he’ll lose some votes. He said there’s just not enough weight to the homeowners’ predictions of trouble, and Cheyenne needs affordable housing if it wants to grow.

“I hope it turns out to be a good place to live and an asset to the community,” he said, “because it sure seems to be causing a lot of grief.”