Research Group Promotes New Housing Plan For Florida Workers

A national research institution began a program Thursday aimed at building affordable housing in the South Florida housing market so that teachers, firefighters and other middle-income workers can live closer to their jobs and avoid long commutes that lead to traffic jams and sprawl.

The Urban Land Institute announced the birth of its Center for Workplace Housing, which will initially focus on creating affordable housing in three markets — Florida from Palm Beach County to Miami, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. — in an effort that the non-profit group hopes will produce 3,500 new units of housing in five years.

The Center will find ways to help create housing for working families who are struggling with astronomical Florida mortgage costs and being pushed farther and farther away from employment centers, adding to traffic and sprawl.

The center will focus specifically on private-sector development of housing affordable to moderate-income workers. Debbie Orshefsky, a Fort Lauderdale attorney specializing in land development and environmental law, said the program’s aim is “to go to bricks and mortar” in a hurry.

“We’re going to build something,” she promised, noting that hurricanes have wiped out up to 4,000 units of affordable housing in the Broward County housing market alone.

What’s more, the storms have driven up property insurance costs, making housing even less affordable.

“We’ve had a crisis in getting teachers” since they can’t afford to live near the schools where they would be hired, said Orshefsky.

The Urban Land Institute is a non-profit research and education group that is supported by its 34,000 members, with a stated mission of providing leadership in responsible use of land, and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide.

In Florida, the new Terwilliger Center for Workplace Housing will focus its efforts from Palm Beach County to Miami, said Marilyn Jordan Taylor, the chairman of the Urban Land Institute.

The new center will employ experts to try to eliminate obstacles that are preventing affordable Florida home mortgage payments from being attainable in South Florida and other communities.

“One major obstacle is local zoning that segregates residents by income,” Terwilliger said, adding that the new center must advocate for inclusionary zoning as a way to achieve more mixed-income development.

One way to do this, he said, is for cities to offer “density bonuses” to developers — allowing them to build more units per acre but requiring them to sell some percentage of these units at below fair market value so moderate-income working families could afford to live there.

He expects opposition.

“Everyone believes in providing decent housing when you ask the question, but no one wants people making less money living next to them,” he said.

Terwilliger said he also hopes the center can establish a fund, possibly operated through the Urban Land Institute, that would lend money to developers at below-market rates to build workforce housing.

“Since the end of World War II, we’ve built according to the mandates of exclusionary and often single-use zoning, resulting in isolated, single-family home developments segregated by income,” he explained.

“Since we invested in highways rather than transit, we built an enormous auto dependency and we separated commercial real estate and retail uses from where people lived. Now we are paying an enormous price for it,” he said.