If you live in Sarasota or Manatee counties, you know one thing to be true: Finding a rental or house you can afford is like finding a unicorn.
Young people here have been talking about it for years, fuming over the lack of housing availability and the sky-high prices for dinky units.
Business leaders have finally noticed.
The Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce hosted a breakfast Wednesday with 30 business owners and leaders to discuss the attainable workforce housing crisis in Sarasota County. A four-person panel discussed shortcomings of the current local housing market and burdens that stand in the way of creating more affordable housing.
Rob Young, an attorney for Icard Merrill and government affairs chair for the Chamber’s Young Professionals Group, said he knows many under the age of 40 who are considering leaving the area due to the price of housing alone.
“We do want to stay here,” Young said. “We’ve tried to find creative ways to do it on a case-by-case basis. There are plenty of anecdotes about 35-year-olds with roommates, sharing a place with a roommate who has kids.”
Andy Dorr, senior vice president of Githler Development, said part of the problem is the expense of land in the city and density regulations in the county that promote suburban sprawl. The cost of construction labor has gone up, too.
“There’s too much regulation with good intention,” Dorr said. “There is rule after rule: we’re going to save trees, we’re going to save green. But when you layer that on it adds 10, 20, 30 percent to build a safe quality home. You have people going to developers asking them to do 10 or 15 year commitments for low-cost housing in exchange for federal and state funds. But you can’t easily ask private side to make a 15 or 20 year commitment and do it well.”
Parking requirements are another big burden, Dorr said, citing developer Harvey Vengroff’s struggle to build nearly 400 affordable housing units near Downtown. City commissioners and planners have voiced trepidation about his plan because it would have fewer parking spaces than housing units.
Then there’s the issue of higher-income folks worried about new attainable or affordable apartments popping up in their neighborhoods.
When the discussion moved to individual tables at the breakfast, some business leaders said part of the problem is branding. Dorr, who led one table’s discussion and shared their thoughts with the room, said when people hear “affordable housing,” they think of government-subsidized housing or what amounts to a homeless camp with walls.
“We have to put a new face on this,” Dorr said. “It’s not the very low income – it’s our children, it’s young professionals.”
But Thaxton said those anxious about new attainable or affordable housing complexes aren’t seeing the whole problem.
“They don’t recognize they’re the ones making the need for an affordable housing complex in the first place,” Thaxton said. “If you don’t want an affordable housing complex in your neighborhood, you’ll need to go to your doctor’s appointment early so you can sanitize the room and take your vitals yourself.”
He added that government officials, developers and employers all need to sit down to figure out how to fix the workforce housing problem before workers move elsewhere.
“The nexus between market rate housing and need it generates for workforce housing is a discussion that does not happen,” Thaxton said. “Let’s first have a discussion so people can see it.”