Five-year county housing plan a start but woefully incomplete

What’s called a five-year housing plan for Miami-Dade that’s headed to commissioners this week is a 213-page compendium of ideas to meet critical needs but falls far short of being a workable plan.

That’s to be expected: the task was handed to academics. It’s chock full of statistics detailing a well-known housing need, ideas for how to fill the gaps, but no roadmap of how to get from need to fulfillment.

I don’t mean to denigrate the report, but it was specifically ordered to bypass county committees and was instead put on a full commission agenda where no one is likely to read a 213-page academic study.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava presented a summary of the report from the University of Miami’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement that made five major points:

■Miami’s vacant housing units will all be filled by 2027.

■The biggest need is for lower-income rental housing, because 217,000 county households fall below area median income while only 70,000 existing housing units are affordable to that group.

■Almost 200,000 more housing units are needed to meet renters’ current needs.

■More Miamians are moving out of town than are being replaced by people from the rest of the nation, and those who leave are lower income ($59,880 per capita) while arrivals from across the nation are higher income ($114,268), altering the housing market.

■County residents are being priced out of both rental and owner markets.

The mayor in her memo reacts to that unsurprising report of housing needs at lower income levels with her own recommendations:

■Gather all available surplus county-owned land so housing can be built there.

■Give persons with disabilities and the homeless an edge in acquiring public housing.

■Have the county’s Department of Housing and Community Development create a subsidiary to develop mixed-income housing for the county’s most vulnerable residents. That was already done in October.

■Market county housing programs to residents.

■Make more housing resilient.

■Promote urban infill development, including vacant sites.

■Drive new development with unspecified financial and regulatory incentives.

■Support nonprofit development of workforce housing.

■Improve public transportation access in affordable housing areas.

■Coordinate better among government agencies to achieve housing goals.

It’s hard to disagree with the mayor’s aims, but from a private enterprise perspective those goals and the voluminous report that supports them fall far short of basics that should underpin any broad housing plan, especially after the mayor had declared a community housing crisis back in April 2022. 

With almost four years of formal crisis focus and a study that was ordered back in May 2023, we would have expected more than a report that documents the crisis that was already declared and offers page after page of interesting but not always practical ideas on how it could be attacked.

For example, the university study suggested that excess hotel and office space be converted to housing. It’s a good idea, except that developers keep adding hotel rooms to meet growing demand, and excess office space is hard to find. How many affordable housing units could be built in such buildings, especially when developers are looking for under-used buildings to raze for more construction at upper ends?

What this five-year plan did not touch on are what businesses would expect to see in a far-ranging plan:

■What is the price tag to meet the housing needs the report lists? No matter how astronomical the number, we need to know the magnitude of the gap. I can’t imagine the number of zeroes in the cost figure.

■Where, realistically, could that money come from? How much from governments, how much from the county alone, and how much from nonprofits or private enterprise? Hard costs are always listed for transportation projects, so why not housing? 

■Under what structure would a community housing plan actually work, and who would be in charge? It can’t all be government, and the county alone can’t lead the charge. Where are the community voices in this plan?

■What volume of affordable and workforce housing could actually be added in what timeframe, and how? Assembling land and then building on it takes time, as do all the underpinning agreements.

■What timetables attach to this plan? For example, the study lists rapidly growing needs in housing stretching out yearly to 2050. What steps must be taken year by year to get ahead of need to keep from falling behind? When would needs be fully met?

■What would it cost taxpayers to meet all needs? Whatever the county begs, borrows or steals will end up on tax bills. So, by what percentage would property taxes (assuming they exist by then) and other taxes have to rise to cover the county’s end of housing costs?

■Where does this report go beyond a county commission hearing? When and how do business and nonprofit leaders, chambers of commerce, the Beacon Council, the United Way and others key to solutions sit down together and set up a team to actually make adequate housing a reality? The mayor or the commission chairman can’t be in charge if it’s going to be a community effort.

As an academic exercise, give the mayor and commissioners an A grade for looking into a vital community need but an Incomplete on producing a real plan to fix real housing issues. Please try again.