Palm Beach Affordable Housing Initiative May Allow for Exemptions

Developers might get a free pass from affordable housing rules in the pricey new neighborhoods spreading across Palm Beach County’s Agricultural Reserve.

Rules intended to keep some new homes priced for teachers, police officers and other middle-class workers could be waived under an exemption the county is proposing for the 21,000 acres of farmland giving way to suburbia west of Boynton Beach and Delray Beach.

County officials say enforcing the affordable housing rules in the Agricultural Reserve would end up allowing the construction of more homes on land the county wants to protect for farming. Approving an exemption avoids the “bonus” homes the county allows developers to build to compensate for limiting some home prices.

“We just did not want any increased [development] in the Agricultural Reserve,” said Barbara Alterman, the county’s executive director of planning, zoning and building.

But with the county continuing to allow hundreds of new homes to spread across prime farmland, it makes sense to require limiting some Florida home prices, said Jaimie Ross, affordable-housing director for the development watchdog group 1,000 Friends of Florida.

“This is suburban sprawl, where people are building McMansions,” Ross said about development in the Agricultural Reserve. “There isn’t any reason in the world that affordable housing cannot and should not be included in those areas.”

County commissioners in November finalized rules that require a percentage of homes in new neighborhoods to be priced from $164,000 to $304,000 for low- and middle-income buyers at risk of being priced out of the Palm Beach housing market.

Most new developments are required to keep about 16.5 percent of new homes priced in the affordable range, with the number going up or down depending on the size of new neighborhoods. The goal? To provide Florida mortgage opportunities those at all income levels.

However, a proposed change to county land development rules would exempt two areas prime for high-end development from those requirements.

One area is coastland, about 23 unincorporated acres near Jupiter, which state officials consider too susceptible to hurricane storm surges for the additional homes allowed under the county’s affordable-housing rules.

The other area is the Agricultural Reserve.

Squeezed between the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and neighborhoods spreading west of Delray Beach and Boynton Beach, the land in the Agricultural Reserve offers some of the warmest year-round temperatures in the state — making it ideal for growing peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers.

With land-hungry developers threatening to transform the area, the county in the late 1990s created building guidelines intended to preserve land for farming amid new neighborhoods. Voters in 1999 approved using $100 million in bonds to preserve land for farming, which helped purchase about 2,500 acres.

Developers claim much of the remaining land. More than 2,300 homes have been built in the Agricultural Reserve, with 5,900 more approved and awaiting construction, according to the county.

Also, three developments totaling 731 homes are now going through the county’s approval process. Builders want these residences to be available to Florida mortgage loan borrowers.

Requiring developers there to limit some home prices without allowing them to build more homes to compensate for lost prices could open the county’s affordable housing rules to legal challenges, Deputy County Administrator Verdenia Baker said.

A cooling Florida housing market should help rein in some home prices in the Agricultural Reserve, “but not enough for the number of people who need it,” Baker said.

While the exemption would let developers off the hook for affordable housing in the Agricultural Reserve, the county is also considering a new fee on luxury homes.

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