- Welcome back.
With 1,000 people every day moving into the State
of Florida, affordable housing remains a major problem.
The Florida Policy Project has been examining the issue
and is offering some solutions.
The group was started by former State Senator Jeff Brandes,
who I spoke to about affordable housing earlier this week.
- Understand, Florida has 1,000 people
a day moving to the state.
Affordable housing is one of the top issues
of the state of Florida right now
and the state's system that it currently utilizes
doesn't really address the underlying changes,
really has been unchanged for almost decades
for how we address housing affordability in Florida
and so we're calling on the Legislature to do more
by just moving towards best practices.
So we've done a whole series of reports
on what those best practices should look like,
from changing zoning to addressing vouchers.
- All right, let's start with the zoning part of it.
We just had a major push by the State's Senate President,
Kathleen Passidomo with sort of a "Live Local."
Did Live Local fix the zoning aspect of this?
- Really not at all.
I would say Live Local's probably
a 3% solution to the overall problem.
In fact, obviously you have
some communities that are pushing back
against Live Local pretty stringently right now.
We need to really address this more holistically.
If you don't fix zoning, we don't fix housing
and that means addressing single-family home zoning
and allowing duplexes and quads to be built there
through up-zoning to allowing smaller lot sizes
so that people can afford the actual lots they're on
and then addressing other issues
throughout the system that we lay out in our report.
But the simple truth is we have to address these things.
The State of Florida has to reset the incentives
so that cities and counties will then come in line
and allow for more housing units to be built.
We're just never gonna get there
if we continue to follow the same old,
tired housing policies that we've had before.
The shortest putt is accessory dwelling units.
Mother-in-law suites, granny flats,
whatever you want to call them,
on the backs of people's homes.
I can tell you in Tampa Bay, it will cost you
about $350,000 per apartment unit that you want to build.
I can build that same accessory dwelling unit
on back of somebody's home for about 150 to $170,000
and so we really need kind of an all-hands-on-deck strategy
and that's something the Florida
is currently greatly lacking.
- In talking to some local mayors,
I know that they're concerned about
what the Legislature has done and when they hear you
or others talk about increasing density,
the fear is is that developers
are going to come in in a way that
will suddenly create 10, 12, 14-story buildings
in neighborhood environments.
- We need to look at best practices
as to what works in communities and what I don't think
Live Local was set off of was best practices.
I think it was largely written by developers
who wanted certain things in their development projects
and were able to put those through.
I think we should really
offer communities a menu of options.
Now they would have to choose from that menu
in order to qualify for housing dollars from Tallahassee
but it would offer things like more accessory
dwelling units, offer opportunities for up-zoning,
offer robust voucher programs that they could initiate
if they followed best practices to do that.
But we really need to turn this
into block grants to the counties.
Look, every county has a different set of problems.
Miami-Dade has very different problems
than Hardee or Hendry or Liberty County does
and so treating one-size-fits-all
housing solutions just don't work in Florida.
But we need an opportunity to do that
and we think that the best way to do that
is by following best practices
and those include utilizing housing vouchers
and a best practice model for housing vouchers.
For example, in Miami-Dade,
people will wait almost 14 years
if they get on the waiting list to get a voucher.
That's unacceptable.
In Hollywood, it's six years.
In some other communities, it's much less.
The national average is about 21 months.
So we can move much more,
we could go much quicker if we establish a robust
housing voucher program while we're addressing all these
other issues like up-zoning, like accessory dwellings.
- Let me just jump in.
So how do you create that more robust voucher system?
- Well, we put in best practices
for different housing systems.
For example, we need to be scrubbing wait lists.
The challenge is sometimes we have
multiple entities that have housing wait lists
and nobody's actually going back to scrub them.
We actually need more dollars
allocated towards those programs.
We need more developers to buy in
to accepting housing vouchers.
One of the things we hear right now
is developers don't want to take housing vouchers
'cause they don't know what's coming with them.
They don't know the type of tenant they're gonna get.
So we need some type of conversation
to occur with developers to say "What incentives
do you need in order to take these housing vouchers?"
But I think it shows, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach
and it needs to be a conversation with
the development communities, with cities and counties
and frankly with residents that need assistance
and that conversation isn't occurring in Tallahassee.
In fact, to my knowledge, there's not one study
going on right now in Tallahassee on housing
and that's just unacceptable when housing
is one of the top issues in the State of Florida.
- So you have a summit coming up on May 1st
in the Tampa area where you're gonna be discussing this.
I think it's sponsored by and helped supported by
the Builder's Association there in Tampa.
So it sort of shows their buy-in.
What are you hoping the conference will achieve?
- Yeah, so we're really talking about solutions.
I think everybody talks about the problem.
Nobody's really bringing solutions to bear
and so we're gonna go through each one
of our kind of segments of our best practices.
We're gonna do a deep dive
and then we're gonna come up with a strategy for how
we're going to go to Tallahassee and address this issue.
Look, we've worked with Florida State and other
organizations in order to come up with these best practices.
We now have a defined list of best practices
that we think the state should begin to implement.
We're gonna discuss those.
We're gonna hopefully bring city, county leaders in along
with developers and begin to have a robust conversation
about what do developers need in order to take vouchers?
What are the concerns about accessory
dwelling units in communities?
What are the challenges of up-zoning for communities?
And frankly, what are the incentives that Tallahassee
has to offer in order to get over some of those hurdles?
- You've used the phrase "best practices"
a few times and I know for people at home,
that can sort of seem like jargon or speak.
You gave me one example earlier of a best practice,
scrubbing through waiting lists.
But what are some of the other things
that could take place that aren't taking place currently?
- Well, cities and counties need to allow for up-zoning.
For example, allowing for duplexes or triplexes to be built
where a traditional single-family home was being built.
That is a best practice that we've seen around the country.
We have to allow for people to move
beyond just single-family homes and communities
and we need to allow for more density in those communities
and the only way we're gonna do that is through a thing
called up-zoning, which we've identified as a best practice.
Allowing for accessory dwelling units,
it's a best practice that we've identified.
It's by far the least expensive housing we can build today
but yet most communities don't allow accessory
dwelling units in certain areas of their communities
and we see this push me-pull me going on in Tallahassee.
For example, Gainesville tried to do some up-zoning
but the Governor came in and squashed that
and so ultimately we need to have a plan for how we're
going to deal with 1,000 people a day moving to Florida
and that plan can't just be send people
to the suburbs and grow the suburbs.
No, it has to include
what we're going to do in our local communities
and the simple truth is if you don't fix zoning,
you don't fix housing and while we're fixing all of that,
we need to have a robust voucher program in place
to assist people today that are living in their cars,
that are living in local motels
'cause they don't have to come up
with first and last month's rent to stabilize them.
In order to do that, we need a process that works
and we need developers that are willing to take them.
There's really three parties involved.
The local government, the individuals
that are struggling and developers and market rate products.
The beautiful thing about vouchers
is it allows people to choose where they live.
They can live closer to their home.
They can live closer to school.
Florida has about 2.2 million people that would qualify
potentially for vouchers if we had the funds available.
Today, we have less than 100,000 people
that are actively on housing vouchers.
But it's shown really to be one of the most
robust ways to get people housed quickly.
- So roughly right now, the State of Florida
spends about how much on vouchers for housing vouchers?
- So between State and Federal dollars,
we spend about $1.6 billion a year on vouchers.
That only covers about 4.6% of eligible households.
So we can imagine what that number would have to be,
it would have to be closer to almost 25
to $30 billion in combined State and Federal dollars.
But I think it also shows the need that we're having.
We're only funding 5%, less than 5%
of the total need for housing affordability
if we were to cover everybody in vouchers.
Now clearly, that's not possible to cover everybody
with vouchers and that's an astronomical amount of money
but it does show where we have room for growth
and where we can make our voucher programs more efficient
and so I think it shows that there's a lot more we can do
with the housing voucher program to make it more robust
and to find developers that are willing to participate
and to improve the products that we have out there
and existing in the marketplace today.
- We'll be right back after the break.