Jupiter says tenants overcharged

Special magistrate finds owners of ‘workforce housing’ in violation.

JUPITER — Tenants have been overcharged up to $421 a month in what is billed as Jupiter’s first example of a builder agreeing to offer long-term, affordable “workforce housing” in exchange for breaks on building limits, town officials calculate in documents reviewed by The Palm Beach Post.

Owners of the Barcelona Jupiter complex off Military Trail say the town’s interpretation is “inaccurate,” but a special magistrate disagrees and town officials propose a fine of about $150,000 for violations affecting more than 50 renters. The fine is the subject of a special hearing in the town Tuesday.

It’s a moment of reckoning for attempts to address a common complaint: Teachers, sales clerks, police, firefighters and others who serve some of Palm Beach County’s most affluent communities say they often find it tough to find affordable housing near where they work. Developers, on the other hand, frequently have a strong interest in building “luxury” housing with the highest home prices or rents they can command, though they might be willing to offer some units with lower rents if they are allowed to put more housing in the same space.

The controversy in this case is whether those rents have been properly set in accordance with the rules, or inflated to enrich owners at the expense of renters.

The tenant at one unit with an income of just above $40,000 is paying $1,265 in monthly rent, $421 more than he or she should be paying, town officials figured.

Another with an income of $52,000 is paying $1,515 per month, $403 more than warranted, according to Jupiter officials.

The original builders were allowed to nearly double the normal “density” — the number of residential units permitted in a certain space — if they agreed to set aside 75 apartments for at least 50 years for low- to moderate-income working folks.

Barcelona’s current owners contend the applicable rules call for rents that do not exceed 30 percent of median income figures in certain government records, not 30 percent of each specific tenant’s income, argued Benjamin E. Olive, attorney for 207 Florida Realty Associates LLC and 217 Florida Realty Associates LLC.

State corporate records list Maurice Mann in Fort Lauderdale as the manager of both companies.

Owners want the magistrate to “reconsider its finding of violation, decline to impose any fine, and/or drastically reduce the erroneous and unsupported fines demanded by the town,” Olive wrote in a motion filed in the case.

Special magistrate Leonard G. Rubin disagreed. He found the “plain language” of a town ordinance holds rents should be calculated based on the tenant’s actual income, but the owners chose to set it at the maximum allowed under certain broad income categories.

Rubin found the owners were in violation “for failure to calculate the rents for workforce housing units correctly based on the tenant’s actual income.”

It’s not clear if individual renters will be informed or granted compensation if past rents are found to be too high in the proceedings. Any fines will go to a town fund “for workforce housing or neighborhood stabilization,” Rubin’s ruling noted.