Deep-pocketed investor shakes up Delray races

The three-person battle to be the next mayor of Delray Beach is the liveliest local political race in the March election cycle, and it’s about to get more contentious.

Former Mayor Tom Carney and former Commissioner Shirley Johnson are trying to topple the apparent front-runner, Vice Mayor Ryan Boylston, who has secured key endorsements, raised the most money as of Jan. 1 and has support from the city’s political establishment. Their online editorial board interview is interesting viewing.

Boylston is a big target, so it’s striking to see a deep-pocket entrepreneur, Kurt Jetta, targeting him for criticism, with the goal of making sure Boylston will never be elected to lead this city of 68,000 residents.

Jetta, a transplant from Connecticut with ample financial resources and a Ph.D. in economics, is on a mission. He’s pushing for an innovative but controversial housing alternative in Palm Beach County known as multi-tenant housing units, or MTHUs, in which unrelated adults who earn less than $35,000 a year live together under one roof, sharing a kitchen and bathroom.

Jetta calls the concept highly affordable, safe and a proven way to reduce homelessness, but Boylston is very skeptical. Jetta operates an MTHU building on Northwest Fifth Avenue that the city grandfathered for communal living years ago.

Like all other Florida cities, Delray Beach faces a serious affordable housing shortage. With Boylston in the majority, the city voted 4 to 1 in December to reject multi-tenant housing, citing public safety and other concerns.

Jetta responded by launching a political committee, Florida Housing Innovations Council, with $20,000 in seed money. He’s running a YouTube ad blasting Boylston for opposing MTHUs while voting for what Jetta says are unpopular high-end rentals.

“He’s not with us,” the ad says of Boylston.

Jetta claims Boylston broke his word to keep an open mind about MTHUs.

“I don’t think he’s fit to serve,” Jetta said of Boylston.

Jetta says he’s holding Boylston accountable for his record, and questions Boylston’s commitment to affordable housing, when rentals often cost more than $2,000 a month.

“He’s never been punched before,” Jetta said of Boylston. “He’s never been held accountable.”

Not true, Boylston says of going back on his word. He said he’ll wait for completion of a city housing diversity study focusing on the racially diverse northwest-southwest corridor, an area known as “The Set.”

“He didn’t get his way,” Boylston said of Jetta. “And taking punches from a developer doesn’t change my mind.”

The vice mayor, whose robust campaign is backed by development interests, said: “I’m willing to listen to all concepts. I’m just not doing something separately for him.”

Jetta’s YouTube ad cites four rental projects that Boylston supported in the past year. One of Boylston’s rivals for mayor, Carney, said he would have opposed all four because they have made traffic worse.

“These projects are another example of our town going in the wrong direction,” Carney said. “We can’t begin to know the real impact of those hundreds of units, yet we are racing to approve more, while people are waiting three and four stop lights at Congress and Atlantic.”

Boylston says the traffic snarls at Congress and Atlantic are more the result of growth in west Delray, and that in the past five years, the city has approved 1,117 new housing units, equivalent to a 2% population increase.

Delray is a less-than-ideal market for micro-housing because of its very unpleasant experience a decade ago with sober homes for people in recovery that spiraled out of control.

But Jetta pushes ahead. His PAC runs text messages promoting two city commission candidates who are pro-MTHU: Jim Chard for Seat 1 and Anneze Barthelemy for Seat 3. The texts call them “the only ones who care about and listen to folks making less than $60K a year.”

As Jetta sees it, opposition to multitenant housing is rooted in bigotry against the poor.

Chard, who lost a race for mayor in 2018, has another Jetta connection. Chard’s political adviser, Taniel “T.K.” Koushakjian, also works as a lobbyist for Jetta’s investment company, an arrangement that Boylston doesn’t like.

“The person running Jim’s race is a

Kurt Jetta lobbyist, which irritates me,” Boylston told the Sun Sentinel.

Jetta said he introduced Koushakjian to Chard, but claims a “Chinese wall” exists between his businesses and Chard’s campaign.

Jetta describes his advocacy for MTHUs as a “crusade,” and says income disparities in the city are widening, and that the need for low-income housing will become more urgent.

Every vote counts in municipal elections, and with all three races featuring three candidates in a winner-take-all format without a runoff, Delray’s next mayor could win with less than 40% of the vote.

“I want to support candidates who support this concept,” Jetta says. “Isn’t that what the political process is about?”

Steve Bousquet