Broward County home to severe housing affordability woes. Who’s making big push to tackle the problem?
Broward County ranks dead last in Florida with only 25 affordable homes for every 100 families.
The county’s most cost-burdened residents — two-thirds of whom are people of color — are spending more than half their monthly incomes on housing expenses. The rule of thumb, according to personal finance experts, is to spend no more than 30% of monthly earnings on housing-related costs.
Only a meager 8% of Broward residents can reasonably expect to attain homeownership, according to a recent study of the county’s housing needs by Ned Murray, Florida International University’s associate director of the Jorge M. Pérez Metropolitan Center.
With that in mind, United Way of Broward County just launched Housing United, a five-year strategic program to bring together the public and private sectors to tackle the county’s most pressing need: building homes struggling working residents can afford to rent or buy.
Billionaire MacKenzie Scott, who has given $12 billion of her personal fortune to nonprofits around the country since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, recently donated $10 million for the ambitious effort to add 2,500 affordable housing units in Broward by the end of 2027.
Led by the United Way, community leaders plan to raise millions more through local, state and federal grants, as well as corporate and individual donations.
Kathleen Cannon, the nonprofit’s CEO, said the gap between the cost of housing and wages is “catastrophic for so many working families.”
The average monthly home rent in Broward was $2,503 during the last three months of 2021, according to Reinhold P. Wolff Economic Research in Oakland Park. Today, 62% of the county’s households renting are having a difficult time paying their rent.
Broward County Mayor Michael Udine realizes his county is affected by a housing affordability crisis similar to what’s occurring in Miami-Dade County. He’s concerned that firefighters, police officers, residents working in the vast services sector and other local essential workers can’t afford to live in Broward where they work.
Udine supports United Way’s affordable housing push and five-year goal of 2,500 additional homes affordable for area residents, but said more construction will be needed to meet the county’s long-term needs.
“We are tens of thousands of housing units behind,” he said. “Every little bit helps and we need a lot more than that. We need to be innovative when it comes to ideas for housing. We need to be nimble in new programs for housing affordability.”
During the ongoing pandemic, South Florida’s housing woes have significantly worsened. There’s been a well-documented wealth migration to Broward and Miami-Dade of technology and real estate investment professionals, from other parts of the country and world. This mass relocation the past two years has put tremendous pressure on the region’s residential real estate market.
Apartment rents and prices of existing single-family houses and condominiums have soared due to brisk demand and a limited supply of available homes and land on which to build. In April, the latest month for which data is available, the median price of existing homes in Broward jumped 20% from the prior year to $560,000.
Although county officials in Broward and Miami-Dade have sounded the alarm on the severe housing affordability crunch, the state Legislature did nothing during this year’s legislative session to help with the vexing problem.
Michael Nunziata, a developer and board member of the Gold Coast Builders Association, which represents homebuilders in Broward and Palm Beach counties, said the limited amount of land left to develop in Broward means more homes overall, no matter the price range, should be built in the county.
“As a builder and on behalf of the builders in our association, every builder in Broward would love to build more housing in Broward County,” he said.
Although he commended the United Way for focusing attention on building affordable homes, Nunziata said local developers need more incentives from South Florida municipalities to do that without losing money. He also thinks building more homes on smaller lots should be the strategy encouraged and deployed.
For example, he’s now building 34 single-family homes on a five-acre site in Fort Lauderdale. Years ago, he said that same piece of land would have been used to build 10 houses.
Truly Burton, vice president of the Builders Association of South Florida, agreed with Nunziata on the scarcity of acreage to build on in Broward, saying the county has “basically run out of land.” And county leaders should give more subsidies to developers to support affordable housing construction, she said.
As part of Housing United, United Way leaders and community partners plan to lobby those local leaders in Broward for policy changes, such as: streamlining the building and zoning process; devising creative ways to entice developers to build more affordable homes; repurposing land use; and enlisting support for the affordable housing program from area businesses and financial institutions.
“The creative capital fund design and collaborative focus of this program are what sets it apart,” Cannon said of Housing United. “The response from the banking and finance community early on has been very positive, as they recognize the benefits of participating in this effort.”
To get the effort going, there’s a Housing United “pilot” underway expected to place 300 of the most cost-burdened residents in several Broward municipalities into 160 homes they can afford. Some of those homes will be available by the end of this month.
For the test program, United Way is teaming with community organizations like Habitat for Humanity of Broward County and local developers who already are working on affordable housing. This test effort is expected to remain active until the fall. Then a Housing United community committee will be appointed and an active fundraising campaign will start to build on Scott’s $10 million donation, and make progress toward United Way’s goal of 2,500 more affordable homes in Broward in five years.
FIU’s Murray supports the United Way’s initiative because he thinks local government, the private sector and philanthropic entities have to collaborate to solve South Florida’s housing affordability crisis. He doesn’t expect the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the state to provide enough money to address local housing needs.
Originally, Murray had recommended to the City of Miami to start an affordable housing innovation fund with capital that would come from various sources, including the private sector and philanthropy. City leaders would have been required to provide seed capital for the fund.
Although Miami leaders didn’t act on his proposal, the United Way in Broward responded with its multifaceted Housing United program following the regional economic and housing market expert’s assessment of the county’s affordable housing needs.
“It’s organizations like United Way and others that understand what we’ve been saying all along: affordable housing is also a quality of life issue,” Murray said. “Unless you have an adequate supply of affordable housing where renters aren’t paying half of their income on rent each month, you can’t have any kind of quality of life.”
This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 12:00 AM.
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