Orlando Sentinel
Scott Maxwell
Orlando will soon have a new community down near Disney — the Four Seasons Private Residences — where home prices start around $5 million.
Bully for all our new neighbors … and the $24,514 in homeowner’s association fees they’ll pay each year.
Ironically, though, many of the people who already live here — the ones who work full-time in the tourist industry that attracts the Four Seasons folks — can’t afford homes of their own.
Heck, they can’t even cover the HOA dues.
Central Florida, you see, is in the midst of an all-out housing crisis.
Our affordable-housing shortage is so severe that the National Low Income Housing Coalition recently found just 18 rental units available for every 100 low-income families — one of the lowest rates in America.
As a result, we have families living in cheap motels and relying on government subsidies. And with rents rising, it’s only getting worse.
This isn’t exactly the kind of thing our chambers of commerce or visitors bureaus like to promote. But it’s the reality of living in one of the lowest-paying metros in America — a community built on the backs of people who scrub toilets, clean hotel rooms and bus tables for a living.
And we need to talk about it.
Really, it all boils down to basic math. Modest two-bedroom apartments here go for $1,000 a month. Zillow says the market’s median rental rate is $1,400 a month — or $16,800 a year.
Yet Census data show nearly 25 percent of all jobs pay around $20,000 or less.
It simply doesn’t add up.
Someone has to fill the gap. And it’s usually the public — whether through public housing, welfare or charitable donations.
You end up subsidizing the cost of living for businesses that don’t pay their employees enough to survive.
There are initiatives we can launch. (More about that in a moment.) But “We simply cannot subsidize the building of enough units to meet the demand.”
Those are the words of Michael Poole, an investment banker from Winter Park who once chaired the state’s Affordable Housing Task Force. Poole says: “The focus needs to be on raising the wages of low income folks.”
I agree. Employers need to be at the forefront of finding a solution.
If it were up to me, I’d lock all the theme-park, restaurant and hotel execs in a room and say: “You can’t come out until you find a way for your employees to keep roofs over their heads.
Because subsidizing your work force shouldn’t be our job.”
Still, there are things we can do as a community. So I tapped the minds of several experts — including Poole; Jaimie Ross, the president of the Florida Housing Coalition; Catherine McManus, CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Orlando; and Shelly Lauten, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness.
All of them said it starts with acknowledging the problem.
“Last year, we accepted applications for 50 homes,” said MacManus. “We got 1,700 submissions.”
All of them spoke of need for better transit. “Part of the reason that housing is so unaffordable,” said Ross, “is that families tend to need one or two cars.”
Lauten pointed to pioneering programs in other cities that have struggled with wage issues — such as the “tiny home” village in Austin and “container housing” complexes in Las Vegas, where shipping containers are turned into compact, quality homes.
But she also stressed: “Government can only do so much.”
Which brings us back to wages. As McManus said: “We either have to fix the wage gap, or we’re never going to fix this problem.”
To both our main mayors’ credit, they have gotten better about this.
In recent months and years, both Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs have started talking more openly about our region’s economic shortcomings. Jacobs convened a housing summit. Dyer has called the wage gap one of the most serious issues facing Central Florida.
And there are at least a half-dozen affordable-housing efforts under way — from the LIFT program in downtown Orlando to Habitat partnerships near Apopka. We need more of that.
The city’s affordable-housing task force, however, hasn’t even met in more than a year. Really, though, we don’t need another task force stocked with well-intentioned individuals.
We need the low-wage employers at the forefront of finding solutions. The mayors shouldn’t ask them to be there. They should demand it.
Because, right now, too many of the workers who make this region’s low-wage economy run can’t make ends meet … and we all pay the price.
Article last accessed here on April 22, 2017.