Panel: Housing law a good start, but more needed

WELLEN PARK — It’s too soon to tell whether the Live Local Act passed by the Florida Legislature last year will result in a significant increase in the state’s supply of affordable housing.

However, a group of land-use experts who participated in a recent The Daily Sun/Venice Gondolier roundtable that focused on the law agree on one thing: It’s a good beginning. In general.

“This is such a great start to where we need to be,” said Danny Nix, an Englewood Realtor and candidate for the Florida House.

However, a quirk in Charlotte County likely means it’s not going to help much there. And large developments, like Wellen Park, probably won’t take advantage of it either.

The law

The Live Local Act has a number of components, including full funding of the Sadowski Trust Fund, which fund the State Apartment Incentive Loan program and the State Housing Initiatives Partnership, and codification of the Florida Hometown Heroes Program, for first-time homebuyers.

The major ones intended to promote the development of affordable housing are local-option property tax exemptions for such projects and new land-use standards to streamline local approval of them.

In general, a local government can grant up to a 100% property tax exemption to a project with 50 or more units, depending on how many are affordable to households at or below 60% of area median income.

The exemption applies to the affordable units only, and only for taxes levied by the authority that grants the exemption.

The law largely pre-empts local control over use, height or density on commercial, industrial or mixed-use property for multi-family or mixed-use rental projects, if at least 40% of the units are affordable for households earning up to 120% of AMI for at least 30 years.

Other local regulations still apply, but a qualified project can’t be made to get a zoning or land-use change, a special exception, a conditional approval, a variance or a comprehensive plan amendment.

In fact, if the project meets other comp plan and land development code requirements, it must be approved administratively, without review by a planning board or city council or commission.

“Some things are an affront to home rule,” said Shaun Cullinan, Charlotte County’s director of Planning and Zoning.

But that’s by design, to reduce the influence of prospective neighbors who don’t want affordable housing near them.

“They don’t realize they’re beautiful apartment complexes,” land-use attorney Rob Berntsson said.

“I do think we have a PR problem,” said Rick Severance, president of Wellen Park/Mattamy Homes.

Some people believe everyone in affordable housing is on a government subsidy, while in a project in which only some units are designated as affordable few people even know who’s in an affordable unit, he said.

He’s a big fan of Live Local, but he doesn’t see it as offering incentives to developers of major projects because they get all the density they need at the outset of development, he said. In addition, they pay their impact fees up front, so the possibility of a waiver, which many local governments already have in place, isn’t enticing.

TDUsThere’s a different issue in Charlotte County, which, Cullinan said, was “always intended to be the affordable bastion of Southwest Florida.”

It was platted for that purpose, even in areas that are under water, he said.

But the county was divided into so many lots that the state imposed a density cap on them. While that positions the county to control growth better, it also makes it harder to build multi-family housing.

The mechanism that lets developers do it is called a transfer of density units. By amassing TDUs from land owners willing to sell them, a developer can package enough density to build a project more dense than a parcel is otherwise zoned for.

The process created a market for TDUs to be bought and sold like stocks. And Live Local projects need them.

The county can’t just do away with TDUs because property owners have a vested right in them, Berntsson said.

A TDU transfer has to be approved by the County Commission, which adds a complication Live Local, with its provisions for administrative approvals, was designed to avoid.

In addition, he said, Charlotte County just doesn’t have a lot of land that can be developed.

“Under the TDU aspect of it I don’t see it having much impact at all,” he said.

Trojan horse?Sarasota County has a couple of Live Local projects being developed and several others in the talking stage, said Jon Thaxton, Gulf Coast Community Foundation senior vice president for Community Leadership and a former Sarasota County commissioner.

He, too, likes the act but has concerns about it.

One is that it doesn’t do enough for lower-income people — workers earning less than 80% of AMI, which is the level at which it reaches the nonprofessional workforce. His preferred target is 60%, covering service workers, as AMI is currently more than $100,000 for a family of four in Sarasota County, he said.

Thousands of units are needed in the 60%-80% range, he said, because the county went 25 years without apartments being built.

The public has no moral right to accept workers’ services and deny them housing, he said.

Denise Dull, Peace River Community Housing Partners director of Operations & Marketing, said she was also hoping for more of a focus on people in the 60%-80% range.

Charlotte County’s rental inventory is struggling, she said, and it’s mostly nonprofits that are trying to build multi-family projects.

Another of Thaxton’s concerns is that the cost of building a two-bedroom, one-bath unit in Sarasota County is $300,000, and that’s with zero profit. The rent for such a unit would be 240% of AMI, he said.

A third issue is the risk that Live Local could be another developmental Trojan horse — a well-intentioned law that later gets modified by legislators responding to special interests, opening a door to projects that couldn’t previously have been approved, he said.

That’s essentially what’s happened with Sarasota County’s 2050 Plan, whose urban service boundary restrictions on development are gone, he said.

He’d advocate for more than three-fourths of the state’s 67 counties adopting TDUs, to assert more control over developable land.

Perhaps the best feature of Live Local is that it’s “organic,” as Nix referred to it.

“You never get it right the first time,” he said.

The Legislature tweaked it this year and likely will do so again in the future, as it’s used more and additional trouble spots appear. Nix called them “opportunities.”

Still, there won’t be a decrease in the need for affordable housing for a while, he aid.

“That’s my fear,” Thaxton said.