Residents of Howard County's oldest public housing complex would face higher rents this fall if county housing officials can persuade skeptical Housing Commission members to go along with their proposal.
A vote on the idea for Hilltop Housing in Ellicott City split the four commission members in attendance 2-2 Tuesday night, meaning the proposal failed, but Deputy Housing Director Thomas Carbo said he and Housing Director Stacy L. Spann will bring the issue back at the Aug. 18 meeting in the county's Gateway building. One commission member was absent.
"The property has basically been under water for years," Carbo told commission members before their vote. Some residents with hardships pay less than $100 a month to live in one of the 94 apartments or townhouses, he said, and five tenants report no income. All but 21 tenants at Hilltop have household incomes under $20,000 a year, Carbo said. At the other extreme, one tenant reports a household income of $76,478 and pays market rent of $1,088 a month to live at Hilltop.
"A lot of the same families have been living there for decades," Carbo said, and more than half the tenants pay less than $200 a month.
This fiscal year, the complex is expected to cost the commission $319,343 more than it collects in rent to operate, and Spann and Carbo have argued that the county has no money set aside for renovations. The commission gets no county money, surviving on tenant rents and fees for administering federal housing programs. Real estate transfer taxes that fuel other county housing programs have dropped by over half since fiscal 2006 due to the recession.
Hilltop's rents, which require residents to pay no more than 30 percent of household income, are encouraging dependence in some residents, Carbo argued.
Hilltop, built on Mount Ida Drive on a hill above Ellicott City in 1969, was the county's answer to replacing a row of ramshackle wooden cottages that once lined lower Fels Lane, just off Main Street, in what was then a tiny enclave for African-Americans. The county-owned homes had no indoor plumbing, and waste went directly into the stream behind the houses. Every heavy thunderstorm brought a sea of mud into the road. Some residents who moved from Fels Lane stayed at Hilltop for decades.
