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It’s Time for an Affordable Housing Attitude Adjustment
 Have you noticed that affordable housing, aka workforce housing, is suddenly on everyone's radar screen? And for all the right reasons.
As the Florida Home Builders Association has been warning for quite some time, an alarming number of Floridians cannot afford to live where they work.
In addition, the dilemma extends far beyond service workers, teachers, firefighters and police to people in higher-paying professions who simply cannot afford the price of paradise.
A Fort Lauderdale-area couple just fled South Florida for Lawrenceburg, Tenn., where they bought a four-bedroom home on 10 acres for $280,000. I've been to Lawrenceburg, Tenn. and South Beach it ain't. But the price was right.
The good news is that people outside the building industry are finally getting it. A few weeks back, I read an article where some of the state's business leaders were complaining that our housing prices were hurting economic development. Ya think?
How long have we been saying that companies will stop relocating to a state where their employees cannot find affordable housing?
Now, school officials are concerned.
According to a report in last week's Wall Street Journal, not only do schools have a difficult time recruiting teachers because of the housing prices (25% of Collier County's new teachers rescinded their contracts because they felt home prices in Naples were too high), student enrollment is flat because young families with school-age children can no longer afford to live here.
The problem applies equally to existing and new homes. Pre-owned home prices have increased by 90% since 2001 to $248,000. New homes, which include the pass-along cost of excessive impact fees, are even pricier.
According to Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate, new 2,200-square-foot homes in Orlando sold for an average of $383,000 last summer. Homes that size in Miami averaged $690,855. In six Florida cities, that size home costs more than $500,000.
The Florida League of Cities was the most recent to jump on the affordable housing bandwagon, creating an Institute for Community Housing and scheduling a series of workshops to tackle the problem.
Make no mistake. Although they are just now waking up to a problem that's been brewing for years, we welcome business leaders, school officials and local governments into the fray.
But winning the battle won’t be easy. And it won't be done without a serious attitude adjustment on the part of a lot of people.
- Business leaders — if you really want more affordable housing, join our fight for fairness in impact fees and support us in a transfer tax that collects money from all real estate transactions, not just new homes.
- School officials — if you really want more affordable housing, start building less expensive schools and support the repeal of the class size amendment.
- Local governments — if you really want more affordable housing, remove the regulatory burdens that can add as much as 30% to the cost of the house and lose this zany idea that inclusionary zoning is the answer.
- John Q. Public needs to back off his wish list of doubling the homestead exemption and making portable the Save Our Homes program (3% caps on annual property taxes increases). While these proposals might help you in the short run, they pretty much doom the American dream for your kids and grandkids. Understand that if you don’t pay your way, someone else has to and, more and more, that "someone else" has just moved to Lawrenceburg, Tenn.
Listen, because I'm only going to say this once: affordable housing is not a building industry problem any more than world hunger is a farmer's problem. Builders build homes to meet a market demand. We're not social workers.
Affordable housing is a community problem that must be addressed on a community basis. Now that the issue has everyone's attention, let's solve it.
Paul M. Thompson is the senior vice president of the Florida Home Builders Association.
Reprinted with permission of the Florida Home Builders Association
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