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Don't blame Florida Keys' housing crisis on critical concern designation
I disagree strongly with state Rep. Ken
Sorensen's and County Commissioner Murray Nelson's claim that the
county's designation as Area of Critical State Concern (ACSC) is to
blame for the Florida Keys' affordable housing crisis.
The very same shortage of affordable
housing plagues all of South Florida, as is regularly reported in
mainland newspapers. Yet we are the only county with the Area of
Critical State Concern designation. It's the desirability of living in
South Florida, particularly the Keys, which drives the cost of real
estate.
While a shallow argument can be made that
restricting growth for any reason makes housing more expensive, that
argument evaporates when one considers that many factors, not the least
of which is greed, contribute to the problem. Greed has resulted in
nothing being done about affordability all these years. Critical
concern's enabling legislation did address the need for affordable
housing, but that need has been ignored.
Until recently, no attention was paid to
the alarming rate at which existing affordable housing disappeared as
older, modest places got redeveloped and residents got booted. Too
little has been done too late to protect the existing pool of modest
housing, and it's still disappearing. Developers and entrepreneurs got
rich building profitable resorts and high-end residential projects,
paying no attention to where their employees would live, until it was
obvious there were no more places the workforce could afford. Permit
allocations for affordable housing have been in the comprehensive
land-use plan all along, but until recently, they went unused year after
year because developers didn't want to bother with merely modest profits
they could make building modest housing.
There has always been a need for
affordable housing, but the lucrative market for more profitable
construction took precedence with developers, and the hugely increasing
tax base blinded politicians to the problem. Politicians love a
fast-growing tax base because it allows them to appear to be fiscally
responsible by keeping taxes low.
We environmentalists make a convenient
scapegoat because we oppose increasing the rate of development. It makes
no sense to increase it. Land in the Keys not only is finite, it is
shrinking due to sea-level rise. Everybody knows that in a relatively
small number of years, there will be no room for growth. It's a
no-brainer that we should be thinking in terms of decelerating growth,
yet powerful forces want to increase the rate at which we move
inexorably toward the concrete wall of build-out. Scary.
Last Stand has been saying these things
for years, but mostly to deaf ears. We've opposed upscale projects that
create more low-end jobs with no provision for housing the help. We've
opposed the ongoing destruction of the existing pool of affordable
housing. We've argued for significantly increasing the ratio of
affordable-to-market-rate within the existing rate of growth.
Many of the same developers who've made
fortunes building resorts and high-end housing, and politicians who've
been delighted that the tax base has grown so dramatically, are now
crying crocodile tears because much of the workforce can no longer find
a place to live. Their answer? Increase density, bulldoze more natural
areas, and cram in more housing. I've got news for them. Environmentally
sensitive land is (relatively) cheap only because it's been protected
from development. Wave the magic wand that makes more of it developable,
and the price of that land goes through the roof. It's a windfall for
the present land-owner and the developer who builds on it — and that's
it.
There are three basic reasons that
development in the Keys needs to stay slow: our limited water supply,
hurricane evacuation (and/or in-place sheltering, if that is chosen as
an alternative), and environmental concerns that include overstressed
terrestrial wildlife habitat as well as nearshore water quality and the
dying reef. None of those problems are going away. Increasing the rate
at which we race toward inevitable build-out makes all our problems
worse, degrades quality-of-life, and destroys community character.
To buy into the fallacy that abolishing
our critical concern designation will help solve the housing
affordability crisis is to admit that the intent of dedesignation really
is a building boom, which will only make developers richer faster, and
make all our problems worse that much faster.
Dennis
Henize is a 31-year resident of the Lower Keys, former
meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service in Key West, and
currently is president of Last Stand, a grass-roots environmental and
quality-of-life advocacy group. |
