To the editor:

When I read the story about the increased number of housing foreclosures (Journal-World, June 12) and then one about unsold Tenants To Homeowners housing in Lawrence (July 9), I wasn’t surprised. What surprises me, and many others in this community is what Tenants to Homeowners officials use to define “affordable housing.”

I refer to the fact that the home I have had since 1991 is not one I could afford to purchase today. Our family of four barely clears a net pay of $43,000. Net income pays the rent or mortgage. Net income absorbs life’s crises – like the ones Sharon Roullins faced in your June story on increased foreclosures. Mortgage lenders base their loans on gross income. Take-home pay doesn’t figure into their calculations. When you start out by defining “affordable” as a six-figure amount, you’ve lost the majority of working poor already!

Most of the increase in property value here has occurred because single-family land-use changed – from homeowners to landlords, increasing speculative value. Modest housing stock, like Centennial Neighborhood, has become mostly rentals – with lost infrastructure (schools, churches, small businesses), deteriorating at an accelerated pace, trapping homeowners who can’t afford to move elsewhere.

Affordability is in the eye of the beholder. Rehabilitating existing single-family housing is something Tenants to Homeowners has fought against, even though the federal funding they receive mandates it. Instead of building new housing no one can afford, how about rehabilitating existing houses in neighborhoods like ours?

Deborah Snyder,

Lawrence