| Back in the 1980's, the late Norman Rossman championed affordable housing in Orlando.
Rossman was a wild-eyed, thick-maned Jewish cowboy as comfortable with a calculator as a concept. When the last big "soft-landing-(whew-it's-over)" was an era-busting housing recession with its autopilot stuck on "plummet," Rossman sold a thousand homes a year - with home site - at $49,499 each. He bannered the word "affordable" big and bold in full-page-double-truck newspaper ads every weekend. For a brief while, he was the baddest dog in Central Florida's affordable housing pound, and more than a few of his progeny are topping out their careers at Lennar, KB Home or one of our other corporate aggregations.
Rossman made his first million long before I met him, but he had an absolute faith that Fla.'s fabulous future lay just ahead.
A thousand times he expressed that faith, in the wording of project pro formas, in the financial statements that followed, and in endless conversations in his office.
The future isn't shaped by the monied, he told me - all their energies go to preserve the past and protect their wealth. The future is shaped by ambition, by the struggle of working families to persevere, provide and prosper.
CWHIP's inaugural cycle will be told by 11 projects that last Fri. promised to deliver almost a thousand affordable workforce family homes, town homes, condominiums and rental apartments - 991 to be exact.
Through CWHIP, Fla. is investing an average $49,445 each in those homes - $4 short of what Norman Rossman used to charge for a whole house and lot.
Eleven hundred such projects would not meet current demand for affordable housing in Fla.
In 29 Fla. counties, the difference between what a median-income family can afford to buy and what a median-priced home sells for is more than $49,445.
Palm Beach Co. alone needs 5,000 affordable homes a year to keep school teachers and police officers from moving out today.
A study released yesterday pegs the need at 90,000 new affordable homes through 2025.
That's just one county. And it's not even Fla.'s worst.
Economists Fishkind Associates' 90-day old Fla. Econocast (.pdf download) projects Fla. home builders will pull 190,000 residential building permits this year.
It's safe to bet that less than 10 percent will be priced so that a median-income family can afford to buy one.
If every one of them were affordably priced, they wouldn't satisfy current demand.
When Fla.'s housing boom was bubbling over and credit-bloated "flippers" cruised condo sales trailers up and down our coasts for amusement, the median price of a home in Fla. was $235,000 and the median annual wage $77,000 short of affording one.
Half of Florida's working families need $77,000 a year more to buy a median-priced home, according to Fla. Housing Finance Corp.
That's right on the edge of obscene.
For communities whose teachers and health care workers and public service workers are moving away to more affordable climes, it spells doom. And there's no satisfaction in knowing that the workers who stay will charge a lot more for their services.
Strip retail developers - the folks building CVS Pharmacies on every four-lane corner in Fla., across from Walgreens - dream at night of 80,000-100,000 square foot grocery-anchored retail centers every three-to-five miles where they can count enough rooftops on their Google Maps page.
At the moment, Lake Okeechobee appears safe.
On average, a 100,000-square foot retail strip equates to about 100 jobs. That's not the same as 100 workers - most retail jobs pay so little that most workers have to hold down two just to pay the rent in a shared flat.
Working two jobs is a fine thing if you're ambitious. Working two jobs to buy shoes for the kids is penury, and in an economy as wealthy as ours, profit gained from such circumstance is utterly and irredeemably profain.
Since the 1980's, Fla.'s development industry has chanted a universal mantra that's made its way into more project pro formas than you can read in a sitting: 1,000 people a day are moving here.
Since the 1980's, Fla.'s corporate home builders have enjoyed unending expansion: bigger homes, bigger communities, stock splits and still bigger profits.
Click here to see why $1,000 worth of Lennar Corp. stock in 1991 would be worth close to half a million dollars today. Ryland Homes? Ditto. D.R. Horton Homes? Double ditto. And the same holds true for every one of the eight corporate builders I checked. Surely somewhere, some corporate builder has tanked, but I can't find one.
I'm not suggesting we hold corporate robber barons accountable for the pitiful state of Fla. housing. I'm not suggesting we blame their co-conspirators in state and local government for abjuring their democratic responsibilities.
I am suggesting, however, that the next time we catch one of their $300-an-hour lawyers pimping a wrist-thick copy of "Affordable Housing, an AFCD Report" - a witless tome patched together by propaganda ministers at the Association of Florida Community Developers - we send him home wearing it. (Download their .pdf copy here if you want to read it.)
Today Florida faces a serious crisis of economics and governance. How we Floridians respond to that crisis may jeopardize the livelihoods of millions of Floridians, alter a 200-year course of growth and development here and turn Fla. into Mississippi with more coastline.
Three weeks ago, FWHN staff member tripoli's report, Goodbye, Florida: Sky-High Housing Costs = Record Exodus From Sunshine State cited a So. Fla. Sun-Sentinel story about the unusually high number of people moving out of Fla.
That story generated more email response than any other on this site so far.
One van lines - the nation's largest - reported it moved more people out of Fla. last year than in. That's scary.
Three days ago, Donna Winchester and Ivan Penn of the St. Petersburg Times reported it's worse than you think:
For the first time in years, three of the nation's largest moving companies say they're transporting more customers out of Florida than into it.
In 2006, what the industry calls "outbound" moves actually surpassed "inbounds," according to data from United, Atlas and Allied van lines. The industry had seen a steady increase in the number of customers heading out of the state in the past five years.
Don't worry, it's not the end of the world. Yet.
Florida still had an overall increase in residents. But the newly released statistics may corroborate what economists have been predicting for some time: higher insurance, utilities and property taxes are conspiring to make Florida less attractive for some residents.
To say nothing of housing prices most Floridians cannot afford.
Fla.'s growth-fueled gravy train didn't start overnight. Fla.'s family-friendly reputation is more than a century in the making.
But Fla.'s callous disregard for the principles and values that warrant its "family friendly" image may destroy that reputation over the next few years.
Once that train starts moving in the other direction, it will take more than a pricey tax-paid ad campaign to slow it (though a stack of $300-an-hour AFCD lawyers might be worth a try).
We Floridians are way behind the curve today. CWHIP is a tiny little analogue that already shows substantial promise - not so much in reversing a trend, but in making life more liveable for thousands of Florida families whose future is Florida's future.
Florida deserves better than its robber barons and public policy pervs have accorded it.
CWHIP is one powerful message - to our working families, striving to build their futures, and to ourselves. |
