| Height
restriction should remain Voters in Key West
made it abundantly clear at the polls last month that they were not in
favor of allowing the building height restrictions in their city to fall
by the wayside.
To listen to the residents who speak on the issue at
various county meetings and workshops, very few of the “common folk” who
live in unincorporated Monroe County disagree with their Key West
brethren.
District Five Commissioner-elect Sylvia Murphy perhaps
put it best when she told the seated commission last month that “The
only people for this (lifting the 35-foot height restriction) are the
developers.”
Maintaining strict height limits on building in the
Florida Keys has long been a battle hard fought and won dearly by the
residents of the Keys. Many feel that the height restriction, which
limits buildings to 35 feet, is one of the primary reasons US 1 doesn’t
look here like it looks in Miami-Dade and we still have that rural
feeling.
Under the battle flag of affordable housing, our
county leadership is attempting to fast track a change to our height
restrictions that would allow an additional two feet for affordable
housing developments. But the ordinance actually would allow 44 feet
under selected circumstances.
With a 44-foot limit, we would soon see four-story
buildings in certain flood zones, and we’d definitely see three-story
buildings with pitched roofs on the waterfront.
The back doors market-rate development could slide
through as part of these “affordable” projects are too numerous to list
here. Even with the extended height restriction, we still have the
issues of density. Most of the development scenarios we’ve seen include
density bonuses as part of the package.
The most recent onslaught to relaxing height
restrictions came from the county’s appointed Workforce Housing Task
Force.
Now remember that this task force is made up primarily
of developers, financiers, those involved in the real estate market, and
various governmental representatives.
Also remember that there isn’t a single representative
on that committee who would fit into the lifestyle guidelines the
committee is using. In other words, there is no end user on that
committee to hold up the hand of caution and say “what gives?”.
We’re told that the task force has given a resounding
thumb up to the idea of relaxing the height restrictions because they
say it will allow more workforce housing to be built on our scarce land.
In theory, that’s all well and good.
But there has to be some way to do this other than
relaxing our height restrictions. Relaxing the height restrictions does
make it easier for developers to turn a profit on a workforce housing
development through economies of scale.
Our question, however, is this. Will the economies of
scale cause our developers to lower the price of the units
correspondingly? The unfortunate answer is probably not.
We have had several dozen studies done over the last
decade on how to attack the affordable housing crisis. They sit on the
shelf, untouched, awaiting the addition of the next one.
Many of those studies had some unique and innovative
ideas that were ignored by our leadership. Too many years after the
crisis became such, we are just now starting to aggressively attack the
problem.
Perhaps our attack is coming from the wrong quarter.
The county has land it has purchased, both in multi-lot and single lot
parcels, with the express purpose of building affordable housing.
Having done just a little bit of research, it is
entirely possible to put up a two bedroom unit for less than $100,000 if
the county gives itself just a little bit of a break on the permitting
costs. They already own the land. At 18 units per acre, with
infrastructure costs and management provided by the housing authority,
monthly rents would pay back the bonding costs necessary to build the
project initially and provide a revenue stream for future projects.
Such a scenario was outlined in a study done for the
county nearly a decade ago, only the prices to build were much lower.
And that scenario didn’t include raising the height
restrictions, nor did it account for developer profits, one of which
seems to be inexplicably tied to the other right now.
If raising the height restriction is the only way our
leadership finds out of the workforce housing quagmire it has put itself
into, maybe they should appoint a task force of end users to look at
what truly makes for affordable housing.
Because the current path opens some very dangerous
doors that it seems most of the common folk, including those who would
eventually use the workforce housing created, want to keep closed
forever. |
