People move to Florida to fulfill the American Dream.
That’s how Mel Martinez sees it, and as a former U.S. senator from Florida and a former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, he’s seen it a lot.
The trouble is, after they arrive, many new Floridians run into issues that keep their dream from materializing.
“Families come to Florida hoping to realize their American Dream; then they realize that the jobs available to them may not be in keeping with the cost of housing and transportation,” said Martinez, who spoke about those issues with Zillow Group Chief Economist Stan Humphries during the latest stop on Zillow’s Housing Roadmap tour.
Martinez thinks housing affordability is a big enough issue around the country that it requires a national policy solution.
He’s also changed his mind about homeownership being an important goal for everyone. If he were HUD secretary today, he said, “I’d be more concerned about rental affordability than making people homeowners.”
The median rent in the Miami-Dade area is $1,907 a month — which is affordable for people who make $38.14 an hour and up, according to a Zillow analysis.
Martinez also called out traffic congestion as a major barrier for people living in Miami. “When parents are taking an hour-and-a-half out of their day to commute, that’s less time with their children,” he said.
Martinez and Humphries’ on-stage chat was followed by a panel discussion with local housing experts and officials that touched on many of the same issues. In fact, one panelist was late because of — you guessed it — traffic congestion.
Key takeaways:
Rein in overseas investors?
Foreign buyers are driving up prices with all-cash deals and often not living in the homes they buy. Real estate agent Ines Hegedus-Garcia said those sales should be more closely regulated. She gets calls from investors in Colombia with $1 million to spend, but they want two $500,000 rental properties instead, because of how hot the rental market has become.
Turn on the lights at condo associations
Ana Maria Rodriguez, a councilwoman for the city of Doral, hasn’t been able to buy a home because she’s been outbid by cash buyers from overseas. Aside from saying she hopes the economies of those other countries improve — so investors will not be so eager to send their money elsewhere — she and Hegedus-Garcia agreed that condo associations need to be more transparent. People should be able to learn about the condo associations they’d be joining without actually starting the buying process, they said.
Getting density right
Andrew Frey, development manager for multifamily developer CC Residential, suggested changing zoning not to allow bigger buildings, but to allow more units in the same space. “We can get a lot more density out of the same envelope and not really change the character of a neighborhood,” he said. Frey also criticized “the whole impact fee scheme,” which allows areas to be built with such low density that taxes do not cover the cost of services, and which does not tax businesses. “It’s basically a pyramid scheme,” he said, that comes from “putting our heads in the sand about the costs of development.”
Raise wages
To address housing affordability, “what we really need is higher income at the lower end of the spectrum,” said Robert Cruz, chairman of the Business School at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus.
Watching the hedge funds
Requiring developers to build 10 percent affordable units “isn’t making a dent” in the affordable housing crisis, according to Jack McCabe of McCabe Research & Consulting. He’s also concerned about hedge funds that are selling packages of property to one another, boosting the price each time they sell. “Are we just going to talk about this for another year and let the open market play out, and then address it years from now?”
You can view the full panel discussion below.
Miami housing tour
Following the panel discussion, Humphries and a team from Zillow toured affordable housing developments with David Deutsch, a partner with Pinnacle Housing Group.
We also chatted with city planner Ralph Rosado and stopped by Ball & Chain, a beloved club in Little Havana that shut down decades ago after being sued for $5,000 by Count Basie.
It was reopened a year-and-a-half ago by new owner Bill Fuller, who said it attracts tourists during the day and 1,600 people on Friday and Saturday nights — mostly locals.
Fuller and Humphries ended the tour with a few minutes of bongo playing, Little Havana style.
Photos by Charles Trainor Jr. and Geremy Herrera
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