South Florida Group Takes Proactive Approach to Affordable Housing Fight
A local group of urban planners, developers and advocates is betting it can help the South Florida housing market in finding solutions to an escalating affordable housing crisis.
According to the Miami Herald, the group is putting local governments on notice that the effort is going to take great cooperation.
That means revising onerous development policies and laws, dedicating surplus land and coming up with creative subsidies, all things many leaders have been slow to do.
The chairman of the Urban Land Institute’s South Florida Workforce Housing Initiative promises the pilot program won’t become yet another academic exercise that results in a study sitting on a shelf.
“Our focus is getting things built, and I’m not interested in chairing a group that isn’t going to get in people’s faces and get things changed so that can happen,” said Michael Wohl.
The seed money for ULI’s Workforce Housing Initiative is a $5 million gift from former ULI chairman J. Ronald Terwilliger. The goal: to build 3,500 affordable housing units in the markets within five years.
The project director for the South Florida initiative, who has not yet been hired will be based in ULI’s office in Pompano Beach, said Carla Coleman, executive director of the local district. She said the time is right to persuade local leaders to change policies.
“It is critical now, and people are beginning to listen now,” Coleman said. “We don’t have to make a case anymore that this is a crisis.”
The South Florida team initially will focus on projects in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County. The team include developers, government officials, planners, finance specialists from federal programs such as Fannie Mae, and others from the public and private arenas.
The initial step will be to take a quick overview in the next three months to identify obstacles on both the builders’ and home buyers‘ ends.
The aim is to answer this vexing question:
How does the region eliminate the hurdles discouraging developers from building modestly priced housing despite rabid demand from workers such as teachers, nurses, firefighters and police officers - all of whom are vital to the economy, but have limited cash to spend on a Florida mortgage.
Once the the most efficient ways to get homes out of the ground are found, the hope is that the same strategy can be repeated all over the state and more residents will be able to qualify for Florida mortgages.
One of the South Florida group’s first endeavors could be a development project with the Broward School District, Wohl said.
“They’ve identified three parcels of surplus land and they’d like to use them for homes and possibly rentals for teachers,” said Wohl, who is with the Pinnacle Housing Group, a development company the specializes in building affordable housing. “That would definitely be a good model.”
He’s also hoping to tap cities, churches and large companies that might have land they want to use to help house their workforce or members of their congregations.
“That’s assuming they will be putting the land into the deal for little or no cost,” he said. “The cost of land here is really, really a significant problem if you are trying to achieve affordable housing.”
Miami-Dade County has been working for months to identify all of its surplus land to find pieces that could be used for workforce housing developments. Public / private partnerships could become very common here, government officials say.
The ULI initiative comes at a time when housing sales have slowed down, but prices remain more than double what they were in 2000.
Many predict that a future glut of luxury condo inventory will derail the planned projects yet to break ground.
Wohl said he hopes to entice developers with stalled high-end projects to jump into the workforce housing market, and the current state of Florida home mortgage rates (near historic lows) may provide incentive.
But again he stresses that local governments and the state need to pitch in to get projects moving.
“Even though the demand is great, it’s very difficult to make the numbers work for affordable housing and rental apartments in South Florida based on today’s land and construction costs,” he said.
SOURCE: Miami Herald
