Exclusive: North Miami getting $42M apartment building for local workers. Find out where
More housing intended for essential workers and priced affordably for people with lower incomes is coming to North Miami, at a time when the county faces a momentous home-affordability crisis.
A 10-story building with 138 apartments called Kayla at Library Place will supplant the Greater North Miami Chamber of Commerce headquarters, across the street from North Miami Senior High School. The $42 million redevelopment is a public-private partnership between the city and Coral Rock Development of Coral Gables.
The city and North Miami Community Redevelopment Agency are giving the developer the 1.1-acre tract on West Dixie Highway plus $5 million toward the construction costs, tax incentives and the right to manage the apartment building — and collect the rental revenues for 70 years. In return, Coral Rock will build the apartment complex that’ll include a gym, conference room and outdoor barbecue areas. The building also will have space for retailers and a new home base for the city’s chamber of commerce.
The homes will range from 660-square-foot one-bedrooms to 930-square-foot two-bedroom units. Qualifying tenants, in 55 of the apartments deemed affordable, will pay monthly rents from $1,097 to $2,000. Tenants of the 83 apartments priced below market rates, and designated for local workers, will pay $1,800 to $2,200 a month. The affordable rentals will be reserved for people who earn 60% — or less — of Miami-Dade County’s median annual income of $68,300. The workforce rentals will be for tenants who earn annual salaries at the median.
Since North Miami officials approved the project this summer, construction could start by next June. And the apartment building is targeted for completion by late 2024.
Typically, affordable housing helps people working in the low-paying services sector land homes with rents they can afford based on their annual earnings. Workforce housing caters to teachers, firefighters, police officers and other critical local workers. With the apartment building planned across from the North Miami high school, Coral Rock Principal Michael Wohl said he hopes to reserve some of the rentals for the school’s teachers and staff.
“North Miami is a great hub. It backs up to Broward. This is a good thing, but we shouldn’t trick ourselves to thinking this is sufficient,” said Ken H. Johnson, a business professor and real estate expert at Florida Atlantic University. “It is a drop in the bucket. We have to build more and realize everyone has skin in the game.”
Indeed, as people have flocked to Miami-Dade during the pandemic that began in March 2020, the mass migration has caused residential rents and prices of houses and condominiums to go through the roof. In the spring, Miami’s average apartment monthly rental costs jumped to among the highest among cities nationwide and have largely stayed at that level.
Meanwhile, price tags on single-family houses and condos in South Florida remain out of sight for all but a tiny percentage of local residents.
READ MORE: What annual salary required to buy median-priced house in South Florida
The Miami Herald reported Thursday people looking to buy a home in South Florida have to make $131,714 annually to afford a property at the median sales price of $589,000 for houses in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to a report by the mortgage site HSH.com using housing data as of June 30 from the National Association of Realtors.
Although the desperate need for affordable housing prompted Miami-Dade officials in early April to declare an affordability crisis, this has been a vexing problem here years before the pandemic started. It has worsened in the past couple years during the public health emergency and yet North Miami is one of only a few cities in the county actively trying to tackle the housing crunch in its backyard by offering generous incentives to developers.
To that end, in addition to the multimillion-dollar incentive package North Miami and North Miami Community Redevelopment Agency committed to the developer, Coral Rock also tapped the county for housing bond money toward the $42 million tab to build the 138-unit affordable and workplace housing community.
“You are starting to see the transformation of North Miami now,” said Cornelius Shiver, executive director of the community redevelopment agency.
This project is one of several similar apartment complex proposals announced this year in Miami-Dade. The county still needs far more of them, FAU’s Johnson said. With an estimated population growth of 122,000 people by 2032, he said the county needs to build 4,900 new affordable and workforce home rentals a year to have enough supply to meet existing and anticipated demand.
For his part, Wohl of Coral Rock commended North Miami officials and called on the county and other municipalities to combine resources to “create a more comprehensive approach to tackling this problem” of limited availability of affordable housing across Miami-Dade.
“We’re seeing escalating land costs, increasing interest rates, inability to execute,” the developer said. “It’s all about subsidies, when you’re dealing with affordable and workforce housing.”
