Affordable Housing - What We Are Facing

Housing values have escalated greatly during the past five years while the average income has increased at a much more modest rate. This gap has created a housing crisis in many cities and counties.

The decreasing amount of affordable places to live impacts everyone: working families, young professionals, elderly residents, those with special needs and increasingly middle income families. What is considered affordable varies depending on income and family size. Generally, when a household pays more than 30 percent of its income on housing it is considered cost burdened.

A lack of affordable housing affects not only the individual families of an area, but the overall community as well. In Sarasota, where many jobs support the tourism market, a lack of housing for service workers poses a major threat to existing business. It also impacts economic development efforts to recruit new businesses. In addition, as more and more people drive to jobs in Sarasota and Venice from areas that have affordable housing roads will become strained and more tax dollars will be needed for transportation infrastructure.

What You Need To Know

Like other areas across the country, Sarasota County is experiencing a shortage of affordable housing options. Both county and state programs have been implemented in recent years in order to address the issue. The Save Our Homes amendment and the doubling of the property tax homestead exemption have provided some relief to Florida residents for the taxable value of their property. However, these issues have not gone far enough in solving the problem.

Housing is a critical part of the way communities grow, as it constitutes a significant share of new construction. More importantly, location is a key factor in determining households’ access to transportation, commuting patterns, access to services and education.

When housing options are limited and require a family to spend a significant percentage of their income on housing, it creates a burden on everyone in the community, especially the elderly, young professionals, those with special needs, retirees and working families with low to moderate income levels. In many cases, expending a significant portion of income on housing creates difficulty affording other essential items such as food, clothing, medical care and transportation, often forcing people into high levels of debt.

In 2005, 15,325 households in Sarasota County paid more than 50 percent of their annual income for housing.

The Sadowski Act Affordable Housing Trust Fund has also been a source of controversy as the legislature left $505 million in fund resources unallocated last spring. The fund is expected to reach nearly $1 billion by the 2007 spring session and it is possible for the legislature to leave a large amount untouched. This is in addition to the cap that was placed on the fund, restricting the money that can go into the trust fund annually to $243 million beginning July 1, 2007.

The restriction on Sadowski funding has impacted the Sarasota County program in a number of ways. For example, the program to assist first time homebuyers with down-payment funds exhausted all of its available funding within four hours of the application opening time. It is estimated that as a result of reduced Sadowski funding, 75 percent fewer residents will be able to buy a home in Sarasota County this year. The rehabilitation program and new construction programs have also exhausted all of their resources. Meanwhile, more than 100 families await much needed home repairs.

These problems are not unique to Sarasota. State wide the number of affordable rental units produced through the State Apartment Incentive Loan Program (SAIL), decreased from 15,784 units in 2003 to only 4,275 in 2006. At a time when rental housing is desperately needed, state funding cuts are reducing our ability to produce this housing by almost 75 pecent.

Sarasota County alone needs approximately 11,000 additional affordable housing units. We estimate that we would be able to provide homes for an additional 560 families with full Sadowski funding.

updated 1/24/2007