Largest South Florida Employer Proactive in Fight For Affordable Housing
Baptist Health South Florida, the region’s largest private employer, has decided that it needs to start providing affordable housing to attract workers.
The five-hospital system is considering building units on two large tracts it already owns in West Kendall and Homestead - and/or purchasing distressed foreclosure properties that have gone into bankruptcy.
The issue has become critical for Baptist Health and many other employers in the South Florida housing market, where companies are having a really difficult time hiring and retaining workers.
In an area where Florida mortgage and property insurance costs have become a stunning burden on the typical family’s budget, businesses are taking the lead in the fight to preserve the area’s way of life.
“People want out because they can’t afford to live here. We need to do something,” said Baptist Health CEO Brian Keeley, boss of more than 11,000 workers at Baptist, South Miami, Homestead and Doctors hospitals in South Dade, as well as Mariners in the Florida Keys.
Baptist’s move could turn out to be the biggest as South Florida employers scramble to deal with the affordable housing crisis.
The University of Miami has plans to build homes for its staff in South Dade near Metro Zoo. Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale is renovating apartments to be used as temporary quarters for new employees. Others are providing assistance with Florida mortgage loans or down payments.
Average home prices have been slipping recently in South Florida, but just slightly, falling 2 percent in November in Miami-Dade County to $372,400 and 7 percent in Broward County to $362,000, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.
“We just don’t think the market is self-correcting anytime soon,” Keeley said, meaning he doesn’t see prices coming down enough so that they can constitute affordable housing.
The non-profit system has plenty of money for development, earning a net surplus of $136 million on revenue of $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2006.
That means it would cost Baptist considerably less to build units on that land than it would a developer buying the land today.
To go ahead would require zoning changes. The Homestead site is presently zoned for agriculture, said Baptist Health spokeswoman Jo Baxter. Two-thirds of the Homestead site is zoned for town house/residential. The other third is for office buildings.
Keeley hasn’t envisioned a price range, but he and other experts believe affordable housing should be no more than three times annual family income. In Miami-Dade, the median income for a family of four is about $55,900, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Baptist employees might be able to afford a bit more house. The average system worker earns $46,862, which could mean a greater than average family income if there’s a working spouse. The average direct-care nurse earns $61,714, not counting overtime, so this initative may indeed make it possible for more people to qualify for a Florida home mortgage.
This new proactive move by businesses signals that, at least to a degree, theories that the market itself must remedy the affordable housing crisis while government stays out of it may make the most sense.
A Baptist task force is also now examining the alternatives of purchasing distressed developments or building new ones. The housing effort came out of Baptist Health’s 2007 initiative to reexamine the way it treats employees.
