Broward County commissioners are close to adopting a 10-year master plan that they said could tackle the affordable housing crisis.

There are a quarter-of-a-million Broward County residents living in “financial distress,” housing experts warned Tuesday.

And it’s only “getting worse by the day,” said Edward “Ned” Murray, associate director with the Jorge M. Perez Metropolitan Center at Florida International University.

Murray told county leaders that the community wants actual solutions, not more analysis and rhetoric. “‘Tell us what to do,'” he said city and community officials have asked. “We heard that more than once.”

Among the proposals in the master plan, which will be suggestions and not mandates:

  • All 31 Broward cities would establish their own “Affordable Housing Trust Fund” at a rate of $10 per person of their existing population. The money could be raised from their own revenue sources or philanthropists. It could be used for down payment assistance or rental assistance. The money would directly benefit city residents.
  • Cities can create an ombudsman position to “guide and expedite” affordable housing projects.
  • Cities can help projects along by reducing parking requirements and reducing minimum lot size and zoning laws to allow more “missing middle housing,” which could include duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses, multiplexes, and live/work units. Efficiency apartments are “an opportunity to increase the supply of dignified housing affordable to people at the lowest income levels, which is currently the largest gap in the county’s housing market,” according to the county’s master plan report.
  • Cities could consider affordable housing on commercial corridors. “There’s great potential and opportunity” along commercial corridors because of the connection to jobs and transit, Murray said.
  • The county can create a tracker to see what each city has accomplished to “keep them accountable.”

The County Commission is expected to keep talking about it at a workshop next week.

Ralph Stone, Broward County’s director of the Housing Finance Division, expects the plan could be approved as early as March.

“There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind. … We have an affordable housing crisis on our hands,” Stone said. “What the plan does is recommend a menu of options to assist in reducing that gap in affordability, reducing the demand out there for affordable housing.”

County officials estimate there is a shortage of nearly 73,000 affordable houses in Broward, and another 74,000-unit gap of rental apartments.

Community leaders said the time is now to act.

“People who are making really good salaries cannot afford to live in Broward County,” said Ina Lee, owner of Travelhost Magazine of Greater Fort Lauderdale. Workers for hotels and restaurants are impacted, and more, she said. “That’s a problem.”

Residents working hard but still “falling short (through) no fault of their own” to make a go of it is often because as much as 60% of their income goes toward housing, Kathleen Cannon, president and CEO of the United Way of Broward County, told county commissioners in urging them to approve the plan.

“It’s unsustainable,” Cannon said. “If we can fix that issue for all of those folks, they will spend more money in Broward County. They will have money leftover. The whole community rises and thrives when we do that.”

Her agency is making efforts: It recently purchased an apartment building in Pompano Beach to be turned into transitional housing for veterans. “But philanthropy cannot do it alone,” Cannon said. “It is all of us coming together to solve this issue.”

But some funding ideas to make it all happen are likely to get pushback.

One idea calls for cities that have an expiring Community Redevelopment Agency to use some undesignated and unspent tax-increment financing money to go toward affordable housing projects. The tax-increment financing money, commonly known as “TIF,” is money set aside for improvement projects within a CRA zone as property values in a redevelopment area rise.

The more property values rise, the more money the agency gets.

“It’s no tax increase for anybody,” said Mayor Nan Rich of the proposal. “It doesn’t take anything from anything else.”

Others said no.

“I do NOT support this,” County Commissioner Michael Udine wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Yes some % should go for much needed housing programs. But taxpayers made these CRA investments years ago, it’s time to let taxpayers share some benefits. Some % of these (TIF) dollars should go back to Broward tax payers by way of a millage reduction,” he wrote, referring to lowering of the tax rate.

Brutal math

The numbers paint a dismal picture in Broward: There has been a 70.5% rent increase since 2016. Rents rose by almost 39% between 2021 and 2022 alone, with the average rent being $2,693 last year, up from a monthly rent of $1,942, according to county records.

Since 2018, the cost of a single-family house in Broward has gone up by 67%, for a $600,000 median sale price in August. That includes Davie ($767,000), Coral Springs ($700,000), Plantation ($700,000), Pembroke Pines ($630,000), Miramar ($622,000), and Fort Lauderdale ($600,000), according to the county records.

The median cost of a townhouse and condo was $275,000 in August, down from $375,000 a year earlier.

About 95% of Broward County residents are unable to afford the current median sale price of a single-family home, according to the master plan report.

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at . Follow on X, formerly Twitter, @LisaHuriash