Miami has a housing crisis. You’d never know it from the lax oversight of this program | Editorial

Miami-Dade County has had an affordable-housing problem for years. But these days, it’s a full-blown crisis.

Rents in Miami-Dade are up more than 50% in the two years since the start of the pandemic, and as much as 115% in certain areas. Meantime, property values went up more than 10% in Miami-Dade and Broward counties between 2020 and 2021. Miami-Dade officially declared a “housing emergency” in April. The result is that buying a house increasingly is out of reach for many, but renting is no longer an affordable solution, either.

So it’s that much more galling to learn, after an audit, that an affordable-housing program — one that all but gives away vacant land to developers — wasn’t being properly monitored. Participants in the program ignored price caps on the land, missed development deadlines and violated rules without consequences.

In other words, an affordable-housing program wasn’t working right for as long as a decade and, seemingly, no one noticed until now.

After the May 26 report by the Office of the Commission Auditor, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava rightly called for a review of the entire process of directing vacant land to developers for affordable housing. County Commission Chairman Jose “Pepe” Diaz on Wednesday called the situation “embarrassing.” We agree.

How did this happen?

And certainly a shake-up is necessary. But we also need to understand how a seemingly good effort to address a basic community issue went sideways so badly — without serious red flags popping up or any apparent consequences to the developers.

Under the program, the county sold surplus lots to developers at reduced prices or for nominal fees. Developers were required to put affordable housing on the land within a certain time frame or return the property to the government.

The audit found that the rules were sometimes ignored, many lots remain vacant and some developers lost the properties to foreclosure. Developers ignored county price caps on the real estate, buying and selling the property at market rates. They also found ways to avoid giving the land back to the county — and, ultimately, taxpayers — when they should have.

We don’t yet know exactly how widespread these failures are. The audit didn’t specify how many of the more than 1,400 lots in the program have actually been built with low-cost housing; it did indicate that about half of the properties have been used. More than 200 are still vacant, but haven’t reached the deadline to develop them or give them back to the county.

And then there was this example cited in the report: Twenty-eight properties the county turned over to a developer in 2004 are now valued at $7.1 million — but they were lost by the developer to foreclosure proceedings. Were taxpayers cheated out of $7.1 million worth of value?

County commissioners are starting to address the issue. The commission auditor is now going to come up with a list of properties that Miami-Dade may take back from developers. There are other concerns, still to be addressed, about the extended deadlines given to developers in the program.

And as the county reconsiders the program, some consideration must be given to developers who were counting on using the properties. Developing these lots is not without expense. It’s not fair to pull the property — or the whole program — out from under them without taking that into account. Of course, anyone who obviously violated the rules or took advantage of the lax oversight shouldn’t be let off the hook, either.

Full review

This program, as Levine Cava said, needs a top-to-bottom review. One possibility the mayor brought up would call for competitive bidding to buy the lots, instead of letting individual commissioners sponsor deals for county land in their district. That’s an issue that arose after outgoing Commissioner Audrey Edmonson in 2020 sponsored a deal to sell almost $10 million of properties for just $10 to affordable-housing developer Palmetto Homes. (Edmonson is now a Democratic candidate for Congress.)

But we’d also like to hear an explanation for why this program is needed at all, now that South Florida property is so expensive. Do we still need to give land to developers at a time when it is so sought after? Are we getting enough affordable housing out of it, quickly enough, to make it worthwhile?

If the county does continue this program, which goes back about two decades, we need clear new guidelines on how it will run and much stricter oversight, with penalties for failing to follow the rules. Otherwise, when the county is handing property over to developers, it runs the risk of giving away the best interests of taxpayers.

This story was originally published June 4, 2022 at 12:00 PM.