Jupiter land swap for unaffordable housing? Par for course in Florida

The brazen move to disregard a “forever” environmental easement on 15 acres in Jupiter to build eight more luxury homes on golfer Jack Nicklaus’ the Bear’s Club invitation-only private community isn’t surprising.

Florida has long been a haven for environmentally destructive unaffordable housing.

The deal would have wiped out the 1993 permanent conservation easement negotiated by Palm Beach County and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which owned the land that became a small part of the Bear’s Club property.

The club had offered $1 million and 20 acres of other land in a swap, and county officials were ready to sign off on it, if it weren’t for a groundswell of alarm from environmental groups and local residents.

“Tell Palm Beach County elected officials that our few, remaining and protected wild spaces are not available to the highest bidder!” an online petition signed by more than 1,800 people said.

So for now, the land swap is on hold.

“Because of the uproar, we just want things to calm down,” Bear’s Club attorney Alan Ciklin told The Palm Beach Post’s Alexandra Seltzer.

So “forever” still means forever in Jupiter. For now, at least. But at some future time, when people aren’t paying attention, all bets are off.

To see this Bear’s Club land swap in a wider frame, it’s instructive to look at the legal gymnastics of creating more unaffordable Florida housing like this while affordable housing remains inadequate and underfunded.

“Median-priced homes in Florida are out of reach for many workers with mediumand high-skilled jobs,” concluded a report last year by the Florida Housing Coalition.

And these workers are better off than about 39 percent of Florida workers who earn less than a “survival wage” in Florida, the report said. One

in five workers in Florida is employed in these 10 poverty-wage jobs: retail salesperson, food preparation, cashiers, waiters or waitresses, office clerks, laborers, stock clerks, janitors, restaurant cooks and nursing assistants.

For them, housing costs in the form of rent can be nearly half their income, so they are unable to save money to buy homes, which are, for the most part, out of their price range.

“Florida has a shortage of moderately priced homes available for low-income homebuyers, partly due to competition from investors and second-home buyers,” the report said. “In 2014, there were about six low-income potential homebuyers for every home sold to an owner-occupant at or below the median sales price.”

To make matters worse, Florida’s mechanism to fix this has been raided on a yearly basis.

In 1992, state lawmakers established the William E. Sadowski Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which collects a small documentary stamp tax on deeds filed with the state. The money was designed to support home construction, rehabilitation of homes for the handicapped, assistance with down payments and closing costs, eviction prevention programs for rentals and paying for security and utility deposits in rental apartments to get homeless families off the streets.

For the first 10 years, the program operated as designed. But there was no language in the Sadowski Act that prohibited state lawmakers from raiding the trust fund and diverting that money to the state’s general fund, where it can be used to plug other holes in the budget.

And that’s what happened. Since 2001, state lawmakers have taken

$2.2 billion earmarked for affordable housing and spent it elsewhere. And for the past 11 years, more money has been diverted from the fund every year than spent on affordable housing. This year, the fund raised $314 million, but lawmakers took $182 million out, citing the need to fund security spending in the wake of the Parkland massacre.

Seems to me that if you’re going to raid a state trust fund to respond to the threat of gun violence, you should start with the trust fund that collects money from the state’s licensing of concealed weapons permits.

Except that’s expressly forbidden. At the behest of the NRA, Florida lawmakers eight years ago passed a law that prohibits any of the firearms trust fund money to be swept into the general fund to be used for other purposes.

So what about a bill that similarly protects the affordable housing trust fund? Well, this year a couple of lawmakers sponsored a bill that protected the affordable housing fund from being raided.

The bill died in committee.

So, if I had to bet, I’d

Since 2001, state lawmakers have taken $2.2B earmarked for affordable housing and spent it elsewhere.

say the odds are far better that a 15-acre tract of environmentally protected land in Jupiter will one day be cleared to provide a few vacation homes for people who spend much of the year living elsewhere than the housing needs of millions of poverty-wage Floridians will stop being shortchanged.