ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Like many Floridians right now, Rufina Cappelli is seeing her community change and her cost of living spike.
“Every time we turn around, it’s something else,” Cappelli who has owned her St. Pete condo since the mid-90s, said.
“The problem is, there's nowhere to go because the rents are so high, or the property insurance is so high,” she added, sharing a common concern sweeping across the Sunshine State.
Those concerns recently reached the ears of state lawmakers in Tallahassee, where last year the legislature took a major step towards addressing the growing housing crisis.
“It doesn't matter how much money you make, you should have in Florida an affordable and safe place to live,” State Sen. Alexis Calatayud (R-Miami) said.
After years of diverting affordable housing funding, the legislature approved and the governor signed off on the more than $700 million Live Local Act.
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“Live Local Act is almost like Batman's utility belt, there's a gadget for everything,” Calatayud, who co-sponsored the sweeping legislation, said.
The legislation includes funding to create or build new housing programs in the state, significant tax breaks and incentives for developers:
- $259 million for the SAIL program to provide low-interest loans to developers building workforce housing.
- $150 million of these funds are recurring for certain specified uses such as redevelopment of underused property and projects near military installations.
- $252 million for the SHIP program to provide local governments with incentives to build partnerships with developers who are preserving available housing or producing more housing.
- $100 million for the Florida Hometown Heroes Housing Program to provide down payment and closing cost assistance to first-time home buyers with a focus on law enforcement, first responders, teachers, active duty military, and military veterans.
- $100 million for FHFC to implement a loan program to alleviate inflation-related cost increases for FHFC-approved housing projects.
“Many of the programs that we created around increasing the amount of affordable rental units are focused on what we call the missing middle, their households that make between 80 and 120%, of an area's median income,” Calatayud added.
The legislature recently tweaked some parts of the law, and in the year since it was first adopted, we are starting to see the impacts.
“We have 15,000 units in development right now,” Calatayud said, adding an additional 15,000-18,000 units in the state have transferred from market rate cost to workforce rates.
Here at home, the development of a residential complex made up of more than 330 units is planned for a Largo neighborhood, part of a development that would replace underutilized commercial space near 8th Avenue SE.
"Projects like one planned here in Largo that would redevelop this underutilized old commercial area, this 'Live Local' really does provide an avenue to provide what I like to say is attainable housing,” Christian Yepes, owner and principal of Belleair Development Group, said.
Yepes says 40% of the units will be for the workforce, which as Yepes puts it, “is for people making anywhere from $40-$60,000, depending on where you are.”
He says the Live Local Act has streamlined the whole process, largely making their planned development, possible and worthwhile.
“Certainly been one of the largest sweeping pieces of land use legislation that I’ve ever seen in my career, it's not to be dramatic about it, But it is truly a big deal providing an avenue for access to truly attainable housing for the masses in the community, where people are just getting priced out of homes,” Yepes added.
A major move to make housing more attainable, but still a work in progress.
Some communities don’t have any Live Local Act developments in progress, and some counties like Pasco County have shied away from offering tax breaks due to a projected loss in tax revenue or not wanting more apartments.
“Think the challenge we have to talk about is Live Local was largely focused on apartment developers,” said former state senator Jeff Brandes, now the president of the Florida Policy Project, a non-partisan research institute focused on Florida issues.
Brandes says Live Local is, “nothing that's really going to move the needle on the housing crisis.”
In part because $700 million, while a significant sum of money, is not a huge amount when you want to develop large properties across 67 counties. He believes more changes need to be made hyper-locally to help mitigate the larger issue at hand.
“The simple truth is if we don't fix zoning, specifically single-family home zoning and commercial zoning, we don't solve the housing problem,” Brandes said. “We're not just going to get everybody to move into apartments. The simple truth is there's no starter homes in Pinellas anymore."
He says the state can find ways to incentivize local municipalities to get on board.
“I think they have to offer and incentivize developers to come up and be a lot more creative, allow for smaller lot sizes, allow for more townhomes, those types of products where we can increase density on the existing land that we have,” Brandes explained. "It doesn't make any sense for a community to have a moratorium on new apartments at the same time, you're begging the state for affordable housing dollars, it doesn't make any sense for us to continue to just zone single-family homes on quarter-acre minimum lots when we have a housing issue, as profound as it is in Florida today."
In reality, it will take a full-circle approach to keep nipping away at Florida’s housing crisis, and while lawmakers and developers say this iteration of Live Local is a major step in the right direction, they’ll keep striding towards making it better.
"We're still figuring out where does work where it doesn't work, where the enforcement of the affordability component, where that falls into it, who's actually doing it," Yepes said. "There are a lot of things that need to be addressed and need to be kind of fine-tuned. But I think the parameters are there for some really good impacts to accessibility for housing."
“We will continually fight for this issue and what it takes is a bit of humility to say, you know, if we can make it better, we have to make it better, and we have no pride of being perfect. It's simply about being effective for our community,” Calatayud added.