Orlando scores on affordable housing
Florida’s affordable-housing crisis is accelerating so rapidly that it’s almost impossible to keep track. Hundreds of thousands of Floridians are living in housing they can’t afford — with a significant percentage paying more than half their income just to have a place to call home.
In the recent legislative session, state lawmakers (for once) paid attention to the desperation of the hard-working people being crowded out of housing. But for too long, this burden has mostly fallen on local governments.
City and county officials are the ones who watch rents rocketing skyward and hear about families crowded into apartments meant to house one or two people. They see the baby strollers parked outside homeless assistance centers. They can’t look away.
And thus, almost by force, they have become the leaders in piecing together whatever resources they can gather. It’s a heavy burden, but many local governments are striving to meet.
Among them: The city of Orlando, which started a pilot program last week that rebates building fees for affordable-housing projects. The project is funded from a perfectly appropriate source — excess revenue pouring in from the frenzy of construction taking shape across the city. In a typically dictatorial move, the Legislature mandated in 2019 that local governments couldn’t carry more than a year’s worth of expenses from building permits, even though many projects need more than a year’s worth of oversight.
Rather than reduce permit fees across the board, the city decided to put them to work, Economic Development Deputy Director Lillian Payne said. Developers who agree to dedicate a certain percentage of their project to affordable housing — and maintain its affordability 15 years — can get all or part of their permit fees back. The city is making the program retroactive for projects approved as far back as 2019, but Payne estimates that about half the $1.5 million the City Council approved last week will be left to incentivize new construction.
By itself, this one program in one municipality won’t solve the challenges of affordable housing. But all Florida cities are under the same mandate to keep their building-permit fee accounts below a certain level. It’s a source other city and county governments could consider. Even better, they can be inspired to seek out their own sources of creative funding. [subhead]A shifted burden[/subhead] None of this changes the fact that local governments are bearing the weight of a burden the state should be carrying. Thirty years ago, state leaders looked at Florida’s economy — with a disproportionate number of people working low-income service jobs – and realized housing was going to be a challenge. So they authorized a small tax on real-estate transactions and directed a large portion of that funding to an affordable-housing trust fund.
A decade after the fund was established, lawmakers started raiding it. Sometimes they took the entire pot; other times they left a fraction behind for its intended purpose. Over the years, the raids swept away billions of dollars. Last year, lawmakers struck a bitter bargain: They’d permanently reduce the amount of money allocated to housing by half leaving a little more than $200 million a year — even though they knew Florida was already facing a desperate shortage of affordable homes. In exchange, they pledged they wouldn’t raid the fund again.
We’re not sure how long that half-off promise will be good, since lawmakers were always supposed to be spending [i] all [/i]the money on housing. This year, lawmakers actually went over the mark they set for themselves, budgeting $262 million for housing — with the majority earmarked for local housing initiatives. Lawmakers also budgeted $100 million toward a program that targets relief toward a carefully selected group of Floridians, most of them public employees — teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters and others.
There’s no doubt this group needs help: Modest three-bedroom homes in once-affordable neighborhoods in Casselberry, Apopka and Winter Springs are now renting for $2,000 or more, with purchase prices hovering around the quarter-million-dollar mark.
As those families are pushed into townhomes or apartment complexes, they are displacing the lower-income families that make up the backbone of Central Florida’s service industry. At the bottom of the ladder are those who were once able to afford efficiencies or housing shared with roommates — the childcare workers, cashiers, hotel staff and theme-park employees — who are precariously close to being priced out of the market altogether. Even as the state’s minimum wage gradually rises to $15 an hour, housing prices are far outpacing that increase. As of 2020, the Florida Housing Data Clearinghouse showed that among all income levels, more than 86,000 Orange County households spent more than half their monthly income on housing, along with nearly 27,000 in Seminole County and more than 17,400 in Osceola County.
Lawmakers may not see this desperation from their lofty perch in Tallahassee. But local city and county leaders have no choice: They must deal with it. When cities like Orlando look for innovative ways to provide more affordable housing, they are building stronger communities, and making progress on a duty that for too long, state lawmakers shirked.