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Vacation homes inflate housing prices
There is no reason that
quality housing cannot be had in Key West and the Florida Keys for
$160,000 to $200,000 range.
The difference between
that price and the current price ($800-million) is just the market
inflation by vacation home buyers. If the vacation home owner can pay
this rate, how about a $50,000 to $100,000 per year tax on vacation
homes in Monroe County?
Since most of these
properties are zoned single family occupancy, how about zoning
violations for the use of these units as vacation residents and by more
than one family per year (270-day period)? Looks to me that a vast
majority of properties are being used as transient accommodations
without the proper zoning. Vacation homes are not an asset to the
community.
It needs to be said,
vacation home owners do not contribute to the quality of life in the
Florida Keys as much as they harm it.
Nick Anderson
Key West
Keep
affordable housing affordable
The recently passed
amendment to the affordable housing ordinance effectively
disenfranchises 92 percent of Key West workers. Because the amended
ordinance changes the formula that defines affordable, all new housing
can, if it passes on second reading, be priced based at an average of
132 percent of median income.
This equates to an
individual income of $54,038 per year. Labor bureau statistics indicate
that less than 8 percent of our workforce earns at or above that level.
Two-income families fare better, but not much. Young workers, the
elderly, single workers and, most devastatingly, single parents, will be
totally priced out of "affordable" housing.
Because of our
hyper-inflationary real-estate market, workers at all levels are having
a difficult time finding affordable housing, but any changes to the
formula for awarding affordable [Rate Of Growth Ordinance allocations]
should require an equitable distribution in proportion to the percentage
of the workforce earning at each level.
There are those in city
government who say that the state Department of Community Affairs will
provide more ROGOs, but because this change redefines the formula for
determining affordable, any new ROGOs will be awarded to build housing
at the 132-percent level.
City staff has admitted
that the intent of the revision is to "encourage the building" of
affordable housing. They contend that unless the changes are made to
make it more profitable for developers to build, our ROGO supply will
continue to languish unused. In other words, it's better to build
unaffordable "affordable" housing than to not build at all.
I beg to differ. If the
private sector cannot generate an acceptable level of profit from
building affordable housing, perhaps we should assign the job to the
nonprofit sector or public sector. Additionally, we are facing the
expiration of affordable deed restrictions on hundreds of units of
actually affordable housing. For example, at West Isle alone, 196 units
may be eligible to move to market rate within the next 18 months.
Fortunately, the
commission passed another ordinance last Tuesday. It provides for
affordable ROGOs to be used to maintain a currently affordable property,
complete with long-term deed restrictions. The owners would then be
allowed to transfer their pre-existing ROGOs to another market-rate
project. This solution has a four-fold benefit: First it retains
affordable housing that would otherwise be converted to market rate;
secondly, if the new project is required to comply with the current
ordinance by building 30 percent of the project at affordable rates, it
would actually increase the amount of affordable housing by that
percentage; thirdly, the community won't have to wait for new
unaffordable affordable housing to be built; and finally, our
languishing ROGOs could finally be used. This would allow us to
immediately make application to the DCA for those ROGOs that are
theoretically promised to us once our current supply is exhausted.
Retaining our current supply of affordable housing should be our first
priority. ...
Vicki Weeks,
president
Key West/Lower Keys
Democratic Club
Illegal transient
rentals create housing shortage
What housing shortage?
Key West
has plenty of houses. What it also has is plenty of empty single family
homes and apartments. (Some say 50 percent). That is, that they have
been converted to vacation residences and now only are used for a few
weeks a year and for short terms by several visiting tourists. How this
happened is that the city and county commissions won't enforce the
planning and zoning code on these unlawful conversions. There should be
at least a $1,000-per-day fine on these zoning code violations, each and
every day of the year. You start seizing some of these zoning violation
properties, and the "affordable housing" problem will solve itself very
quickly. Any residential property not zoned for transient use should be
fully utilized 12 months a year.
When I lived in
Hawaii,
('89-'96), anything less than a six month lease/occupancy was considered
commercial visitor lodging, with all the health/safety and fire code
regulations enforced. This helped keep the neighborhoods [as]
neighborhoods, and the tourist lodgings [as] tourist lodgings.
Will it work in
Monroe
County? Depends on
what the registered voters decide. Does anyone want to push the issue?
Nick Anderson
Key West
Wages are at root of housing crisis
For every man, woman and
child in the United States there exists approximately 1 inch of
waterfront land. Thus the demand for and the price of such precious
resources rises exponentially as population expands and land prices
rise. Waterfront land is recreational land, and recreational land, in a
society of sharply rising retirees, has no foreseeable upper limit of
value.
Key West's
problem is that all of our land is either waterfront or water-near land.
There are no large tracts of nonrecreational land suitable for low-cost
housing from Florida City to Key West.
It is this immutable and
unique characteristic of the Keys that [author William] Hettinger has
failed to take into account. The recreational communities that Hettinger
claims have solved their community housing conundrum are surrounded by
expanses of nonrecreational land economically suitable for middle- and
low-income housing. This has been dubbed the Disney Solution, in which
the workers in a recreational area, such as
Disneyland,
are forbidden to live within the area. Hettinger's solutions do not
apply to the Keys.
Submarket-priced housing,
so-called affordable housing, is not a viable option for the Keys. In
our community, affordable housing is a myth that the public cannot
afford. Those who push for taxpayers to pay for housing in order to
allow them to continue to pay submarket-price wages are imposing a cost
on the public that should correctly be borne by the industries that, by
failing to pay a living wage, have actually created our low-income
housing problem.
Wages must be paid that
either compensate for housing costs in the Keys or, at least compensate
for the inconvenience of long commutes for the people they employ. ...
Reese Palley,
Key West |
