Miami offers cash, guidance to help landlords protect affordable housing from climate change
In Miami-Dade County, the most expensive metro area in the nation, the people least equipped to handle the twin threats of strengthening hurricanes and rising sea levels are residents of the slim stock of affordable housing.
A new program — Keep Safe Miami — is designed to offer a carrot to the people in power to actually do something about it: landlords.
The program centers around an online tool, designed by nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, that informs owners of multifamily buildings of the risks they face and possible solutions, as well as tips on where to find federal and state grants and loans to pay for it.
That could include anything from elevating an air conditioner to installing impact windows to raising the entire building, changes that not only make tenants safer but also increase property value.
It’s open to anyone who owns an affordable multifamily housing building in Miami-Dade, where a third of all renters live in housing that might not hold up if a hurricane blew through.
For building owners in the city of Miami, it comes with a chance to tap a $500,000 fund — a relatively small amount of cash compared to community needs estimated to be in the billions.
Still, officials hope the prospect of grants and low-interest loans is enough to convince landlords who often don’t have the money, or perhaps the incentive, to make sometimes expensive investments.
Miami’s financial offering for landlords is unique, Sara Haas, director of the southeast market for Enterprise, said in a Tuesday webinar announcing the tool.
“The reality is that there are very limited resources for renovation,” she said. “This is a real challenge.”
‘Generational protections’
Keep Safe Miami also points property owners toward a handful of grants and loans they can use to pay for the often pricey renovations they need. Mostly they’re from FEMA or other branches of the federal government, but there are a handful of county and city programs available.
Miami has a $500,000 pot of money to loan building owners who complete the Keep Safe audit. Landlords can get up to $100,000 in the form of a loan they don’t have to pay back for 10 years as long as the property remains occupied by low-income renters.
The city also has its $400 million Miami Forever Bond, about half of which is dedicated to improving the city’s infrastructure to weather sea level rise and $100 million or so dedicated to improving the city’s affordable housing stock. That includes a $4 million grant program to help single-family homeowners make their homes storm-ready.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez suggested that these funds could help “to prevent gentrification, which we see pre-pandemic, pre-climate risk, but it’s definitely accelerating.”
Hattie Willis, founder of South Florida community justice organization Communities United, told listeners on the webinar that renters in Miami-Dade live in properties without air conditioning or backup generators to keep them safe when a storm knocks power out.
And when a hurricane does come, Willis said, those same renters are often displaced while their substandard housing gets repaired.
“It’s a pandemic on top of a pandemic,” she said.
Solar as a solution
Miami-Dade is planning for a little over two feet of sea rise by 2060, by which point more than 2,300 affordable housing units will be at risk of flooding driven by sea level rise, according to a University of Miami analysis.
And that’s just counting the properties subsidized or paid for with government funds. Experts say most affordable housing in Miami-Dade is just cheap and usually in poor condition.
“These efforts are focused on making generational protections,” Amy Knowles, chief resilience officer for Miami Beach, said in the webinar. “We have to prepare, and it’s programs like this that pave the way.”
An example of one project intended to help vulnerable residents is already underway in Miami-Dade at Gibson Plaza, a 65-unit apartment complex for elderly low-income residents in Coconut Grove.
Miami-Dade is spending $500,000 to replace the roof on the complex and prepare it to hold a solar panel and battery backup system funded with a $200,000 grant from the Leon Lowenstein Foundation.
Duanne Andrade, chief financial officer of the Solar Energy Loan Fund, which got the grant, said the solar and battery combination will ensure that in a power outage the hallways will stay lit, the elevators will work and the administrative office where the residents’ medications are stored will remain air-conditioned and cool. The solar system will not provide power to the individual units.
“It’s going to be an example of what can be done that can be replicated, not only in Miami-Dade but all over the state,” she said.
Andrade said the county is expected to save about $10,000 a year in energy costs with the new solar array.
