ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — New housing projects in St. Petersburg continue to go up, but for many tenants, so has the rent.
“The prices have gone, quite frankly, berserk,” St. Pete City Councilman Richie Floyd said. “Things are difficult for long-term residents and people trying to stay in the area, just working for a living.”
Floyd is looking to help struggling renters with a plan to increase city-owned housing.
“The city can reap revenue off of rents from mixed-income housing and use that revenue to pay for bonds and build more housing,” Floyd said.
Floyd says this would be quality housing on land owned by the city, something he says is just one of the factors that would make this plan successful.
“The city is one of the largest landholders in the entire city, so we already own land,” Floyd said. “We get a subsidy from not having to buy a lot of land to do this with, we can start with land we already own.
"And then we get a subsidy because we don’t have to pay ourselves property taxes, and then on top of that, we’re not trying to extract a profit.”
Floyd says, the city already offers benefits to developers who offer mixed-income housing. He told 10 Tampa Bay those places have people paying the full market rent, while some units are carved out to be offered at a lower rate for affordable housing.
He says this plan would be similar, just city-owned and more sustainable for renters.
“All of the units are nice, it’s just you use the higher rents to subsidize the lower things instead of taking a profit out,” Floyd said. “Places that have done this only have 7 percent rent increases per year. You’re going to be in a more stable situation than you would be in private market-rate housing.”
Floyd says even if the city moves forward with this plan, the private market will, of course, always be available for people who prefer to live there.
His hope is just to offer some renter relief.
“It’s gotten incredibly difficult for a lot of people,” he said.
Floyd says making this happen will likely take quite some time, but in the next few weeks, he plans formally introduce the idea to the city council as a new business to officially start the conversation of moving forward.