DEBARY, Fla. – As Florida’s population has rapidly increased over the years, demand for housing has reached an all-time high and the supply of affordable housing has not kept up.
To combat the problem, lawmakers passed the Live Local Act during last year’s legislative session. The sweeping measure was meant to create more housing for Florida’s workforce by making it easier for developers to build units.
However, some lawmakers are now looking to adjust the law after several smaller cities in the state have expressed concerns, including DeBary’s city manager Carmen Rosamonda.
“We’re almost built out,” Rosamonda said. “There’s not going to be much more growth here in the city of DeBary, and that commercial tax base is going to be very important for the future of our community.”
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DeBary is housing-rich and jobs-poor, which is why that commercial tax base is so critical. The law allows developers to bypass local zoning rules if enough workforce housing is included, and there’s very little local cities can do to stop it from happening.
“They took away some of our home rules, so to speak, where some of these projects have to be administratively approved if they have 40% affordable housing units,” Rosamonda said. “That puts a strain on all of the comprehensive planning we’ve done in the last 40 years. It can certainly turn cities upside down and really change some of the planning that’s been done all these years.”
Developers across the state have been pushing ahead with projects that qualify for tax breaks under the new law, but Rosamonda says that can have a major impact on infrastructure costs that normally fall on the developer.
“For small cities, that’s a major issue,” he said. “We’ve got 23,000 residents. Orlando has 2 million. The cost of building a road or expanding a road in DeBary costs exactly the same as it is in Orlando. That’s where small cities are really concerned about having to share this cost with the residents in future years if they get one or two or three of these projects.”
While the overall goal of the law is to make housing more affordable for Floridians, Rosamonda says it really depends on where a “live local” development is being built.
“I’m not sure they’re going to achieve actual affordable housing,” he said. “They’re going to get a lot of apartments, but the 80-120% median income range that’s established by the Florida Housing Finance Corporation – and this law ties to that – is really current market rate. Then it appears to be an apartment builder’s handout rather than really going towards affordable housing.”
Florida’s legislative session got underway on Tuesday and two identical bills are moving through committee that would make slight adjustments to the Live Local Act.
Rosamonda says Senate Bill 328 and House Bill 1239, filed by South Florida lawmakers, don’t go far enough, and ideally, he’d like to see smaller cities get exempt from the law.
“They’ve taken the industrial out of the uses, so it’s just commercial and mixed-use,” he said. “If it passes, industrial is taken out. That’s a plus. They’ve softened on the height requirements, so you don’t end up with a six or seven-story building next to a one or two-story building. More needs to be done. More clarity needs to be done.”
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