A year ago last month, when the city of Chattanooga proposed buying the 74-room Airport Inn on Lee Highway and turning it into an apartment for low-income residents, officials suggested such an affordable housing solution could become a model that could be replicated.
The process between last year’s proposal and Tuesday’s expected vote by the Chattanooga City Council’s vote to rezone and declare surplus the now-shuttered and fenced former hotel, though, is not something the city should replicate.
While we ultimately support the plan to remodel the inn into a gated, security guarded, camera-laden affordable housing apartment complex, we believe a lack of communication and transparency over the ensuing year since the purchase sowed regrettable mistrust among area businesses, church members, students and parents.
Before the $2.79 million purchase with onetime federal American Rescue Plan funds in October 2021, which came with the unanimous agreement of the City Council, city officials were hitting all the right notes.
What the city does, said Joda Thongnopnua, chief of staff for Mayor Tim Kelley, will depend “on what we hear from the neighborhood.”
What the neighborhood said at the time about the Airport Inn and three adjoining low-priced hotels was that the area was “a constantly evolving drama with police officers and ambulances.”
Thongnopnua suggested the apartments that would be created might “bring up the neighborhood, add some life in.”
So far, so good. But then most of a year went by with little communication between the city and nearby Silverdale Baptist Church (SBC), Silverdale Baptist Academy (SBA), Silverdale Cumberland Presbyterian Church and other businesses.
We would argue that city officials might have spent that year massaging potential concerns about the apartments because that’s what they began to hear when rezoning signs were posted and the first reading on the request to rezone the property from convenience commercial to urban general commercial drew near.
A series of neighborhood meetings reiterating the safety measures the city planned to put in place might have been all that was necessary to alleviate what was to ensue.
For instance, Becky Hansard, headmaster of Silverdale Baptist Academy, said city officials promised to keep the school in the loop but claimed in an Oct. 28 letter to the “Silverdale [Academy] family” that they hadn’t lived up to their promise.
“For over a year,” she wrote, “we have asked for transparency from the city concerning this project. There were numerous inconsistencies stated [at a public meeting] Wednesday night. Let me be clear on one. The mayor stated that he had met with me numerous times. While I have asked numerous times to meet with him, that only happened last week. And while I do appreciate that meeting and felt it was extremely beneficial, I need to clarify that for you, our stakeholders. Other than last week’s meeting with the mayor, members of SBC and SBA have met only two additional times with the city on this issue.”
Hansard went on to say the school is not fighting the city over the project but, after “a season of research and fact-checking,” its officials “are not convinced an appropriate infrastructure can happen in this area’s setting.”
Others, including former Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd, have said they felt the lack of transparency on the project is similar to that on the new Southside stadium, which he said was pushed “down the public’s collective throats” without enough questions being answered.
He said he sent the city a set of questions to answer about the hotel project but did not hear back.
However, the city essentially has not changed from a year ago what it planned to do. They said in October 2021 it was not to be a homeless shelter but more of an apartment complex with wraparound services to help keep people housed.
And, last month in a comment that supported what Thongnopnua said in October 2021 about the potential for improving the neighborhood, Kelly said 911 calls in the area since the city purchased the hotel have decreased 47%.
It’s a complex issue, for sure, with the city on the one hand hoping the former hotel can alleviate the area’s growing affordable housing problem while keeping people safe, and area schools, churches and businesses on the other wanting to carry out their various missions or operations while similarly protecting their students, members, employees and clientele.
We acknowledge and understand the need for safety at churches, schools and businesses in the vicinity, but we cannot imagine what the city says it ultimately will have at the former Airport Inn can be a step down from what has existed around the four low-budget hotels bunched together on Lee Highway for many years now.
It should be noted, too, that the former hotel is the fourth down Lee Highway from the corner of Lee Highway and Bonny Oaks Drive, where the churches and school sit a block away. The chance that someone from the apartments would venture to the churches and school with something untoward in mind is probably less than that for someone at the hotels closer to the corner.
We encourage the city and the future apartment complex’s neighbors to continue to communicate as the project ramps up and for the city to be transparent with other neighborhoods if this proves to be a good affordable housing model to replicate.