I read with great interest the article in The Meridian Star on Sunday (“Application cutoff nears for housing developers”) about the affordable housing proposals for the city of Meridian.

Mr. Chuck Morris, vice president of the Mississippi Home Corp., stated that it’s not low-incoming housing; it’s affordable housing. Those semantics put a whole new spin on life for me. I no longer drive a used car; it’s preowned. And the garbage man has always been a sanitation engineer!

Now, The Star’s public opinion poll states developers should not be restricted and should have a right to build anywhere they want. In my opinion, the city of Meridian is at a critical crossroads, and proper planning now by city officials can increase the tax base and not continue to drive the new growth outside the city limits. These developers, in my opinion, should be restricted by the city so they fit into the city’s land-use plan.

These developers are going after tax credits and hiding behind the poor to make a fast dollar. The long-term effects of letting developers run the city without oversight is incomprehensible. This project is just another well-intentioned program by the government to do a quick fix.

I have never heard of a low-income person who thought moving to a housing project had a positive influence on his life. Most people are trying to get out of a housing project. A better use of tax credits would be to use them to acquire and renovate the abandoned and burned-out houses that are scattered throughout the city for use by low-income residents. Rebuilding old neighborhoods and eliminating these eyesores is a much better way to spend tax dollars than herding all the low-income people into a housing project.

J. Marshall McCraney

Meridian