Southwest Florida Housing Market Strives to Put Ownership in Reach
With an income of $24,000, Halima Portillo had all but given up the dream of homeownership in the pricey Southwest Florida housing market.
She resigned herself to living in a subsidized apartment and keeping her two young boys inside, away from drug dealers and wild neighbors.
Then Hurricane Charley came and destroyed Portillo’s apartment and nearly everything she owned. She calls it her blessing in disguise.
Amidst the outpouring of post-hurricane help, she came across an affordable housing program pushed by state and county officials as the latest solution to the housing crisis.
Portillo is one of the first people to purchase a home under the nonprofit community land trust that many counties are adopting.
“Being a single mother and the way the prices went up after Charley, I never thought I’d be able to afford my own home,” Portillo said.
With more Florida mortgage seekers expected to apply in droves, Sarasota’s trust is a few months away from breaking ground on its first project, which will either be a condominium or townhome development, officials said.
Fledgling trusts also are under way in Lee County and Collier County.
Reports say Manatee County is also considering a trust program.
“The system is really taking off, and Charlotte is one of the first of this new wave of land trusts,” said Gladys Schneider, an advisor on land trusts for the Florida Housing Coalition.
State housing officials began to heavily promote community land trusts in 2004 as the hot real estate climate was pricing many working-class families out of the housing market.
Such cities as Burlington, Vt., have long used land trusts to keep housing prices affordable for lower-income families, but only a handful existed in Florida in extremely high-priced areas such as the Florida Keys.
Even in May, after a drop in the real estate market, median home prices ranged from $294,800 in Sarasota-Bradenton to $197,100 in Charlotte County and North Port.
Land trusts keep housing prices low by subsidizing Florida mortgage loans and retaining ownership of the land. Residents get a 99-year lease.
Portillo’s house cost $133,000 to build - not including the land - but she only pays $456 a month on a $45,000 Florida home loan.
She received three state housing grants worth $88,000. But Portillo does not get to keep that money. It stays with the home.
If Portillo sells the house, she only can recoup what she has paid on the Florida home mortgage. The next buyer then gets a large discount compared with market prices.
To qualify, home buyers must make 80 percent of the area’s median income or less - about $36,600 for a family of three in Charlotte County. Sarasota’s program is geared more toward moderate-income households making 60 to 100 percent of the area’s median income - about $55,000 for a family of four.
The system allows lower-income families to build up their net worth, with the idea that most eventually will move on up and buy a non-subsidized, market-price home.
Sarasota and Charlotte Counties both formed the housing land trusts in mid- to late 2005.
It took a year for officials to craft the complicated legal agreements, and another year for Charlotte to get the first houses built.
The slow Southwest Florida housing market has actually helped the trusts by driving counties’ land prices down.
Charlotte trust officials initially planned to buy 12 vacant lots with a $750,000 grant from the county but are now planning for 20.
Aside from Portillo’s home, four other houses are under construction and close to completion.
“We’re really starting to pick up steam,” said Brenda Bala, executive director of the nonprofit Housing Corporation of Charlotte County and one of the people who helped get Charlotte’s trust started.
Sarasota County is taking a different approach.
The Sarasota trust has three large pieces of land donated by the city and the county. The trust plans to build 84 housing units, all in the form of multi-family townhomes or condominiums.
“We wanted to maximize what we can do with limited resources,” said Martina Guilfoil, CEO for the Community Housing Trust of Sarasota County.
For her part, Portillo could not be happier with her single-family home she moved into last month on a sparsely populated street in Port Charlotte.
SOURCE: Sarasota Herald-Tribune
