Peggy Boik is tired of competing with the city of Austin.

Wednesday, September 08, 1999

Peggy Boik is tired of competing with the city of Austin. So is Earl Gwin. Both rental property owners, the pair voiced their disapproval of the city’s existing Courtyard I Apartments and proposed Courtyard II Apartment building at Tuesday’s council meeting.

"My husband and I own 12 rental units," Boik said. "We pay almost $9,000 a year in property tax alone on those properties. The Courtyard I – with nearly 80 units – I understand pays about $25,000. I love being a landlord, but it gets tougher and tougher because we’re competing with the government for pricing and tenants and the government doesn’t have to pay taxes as such."

Boik and Gwin weren’t the only ones there to talk about the Housing and Redevelopment Authority-owned Courtyard Apartments. Rich Osness, local businessman and frequent political candidate, made his second appearance in as many months to speak against the middle-to-upper-income level apartments. He compared the rent that a private developer would have to charge (estimated at between $1,000-$1,200 a month) to that being charged by the HRA (between $600-$700 a month).

"The Courtyard Apartments raise everybody’s taxes to reduce the housing costs for a favored few," Osness said. "The HRA’s projections are that the people who move into Courtyard II will pay about $5,000 a year less than it costs to provide that housing."

After his presentation, Osness presented Mayor Bonnie Rietz with a petition signed by approximately 150 residents asking the city to sell Courtyard I and not proceed with Courtyard II.

That request to sell and to abort was strongly seconded by Boik and Gwin. At one point Gwin compared the deal the residents of the Courtyard Apartments get to a citizen getting the government to pay the difference between the citizen driving a Chevy or a Cadillac.

"The people who live in those apartments make a moderate to high income," Gwin said. "We’re subsidizing their rent … There’s such a thing as supply and demand. If the demand gets high enough, private developers will come. They won’t come if they have to compete with you."

HRA director Kermit Mahan wasn’t present at the meeting, but council member and HRA Board chairman Dick Lang maintained that to make the community thrive and survive, the city needed housing.

"Do you have anything to rent?" Lang asked Gwin. "Because if you do, give me the address. I get lots of calls everyday … A woman moved here with two small children; she had to stay in a motel for a month before she could find a place to rent."

"There are tools at both the low and high end that help such housing get built," Mahan said in July after a similar complaint from Osness. "It’s the middle, that 60-80 percent of the median, that don’t get built. The majority of the people who live in the Courtyard are middle of the road … Notice, we’re not building townhomes for sale. Private industry can and is taking care of that. They aren’t taking care of this, and we’ve tried to recruit them."

After Tuesday’s meeting, HRA board member/Council member at-large Dick Chaffee said plans for the Courtyard II building were advancing more rapidly, and that he expected more details to be settled at the HRA’s 4:30 p.m. meeting today.

The council has not definitively voted to proceed with phase two of the project, although with a waiting list of more than 50 people for Courtyard I, there have been no strong objections from council members.