By Kate Santich | Orlando Sentinel
On the top floor of a popular new apartment complex in Clermont, Jeremy Elliott spreads his arms to soak in the ambiance of his 3-week-old home — wood and tile floors, high ceilings, stainless steel appliances and expansive windows that overlook the countryside.
“I don’t even have the words,” Elliott said, grinning. “All this for $665 a month? Crazy.”
At the very least, it’s extraordinarily rare. The $20 million, 96-unit Woodwinds Apartments, officially opened late last month, was built in part with $4 million from the state’s affordable housing trust fund and is considered “workforce” housing — typically, for those making a little better than minimum wage. Even with its community pool and swanky clubhouse, it rents at less than half the going rate for neighboring complexes.
In Central Florida in particular, and Florida in general, quality housing at this price is in desperately short supply. Yet the state’s residents could have had a lot more housing like it — $2.19 billion more, to be exact — if legislators had not diverted money from the William E. Sadowski Affordable Housing Trust Funds for at least 15 of the past 26 years.
For the past 10 years straight, lawmakers have taken money designated for affordable housing and swept it into the pot for the general budget. In lean years, they’ve argued they needed it to avoid a deficit. Other years, they’ve spent it to offset tax cuts — including those for expensive yacht repairs — or to cover unexpected needs, such as school safety measures passed after the Parkland shooting.
There is nothing illegal about the diversion. But at a time when 911,000 very low-income Floridians pay more than half their income on housing and some 84,000 people are estimated to be homeless in the state — not including tens of thousands of families living in motels — opponents of the practice are increasingly outraged.
“How do you get people to see that this is a moral issue?” said Steve Smith, a retired banker and co-founder of the nonprofit New Beginnings of Central Florida, where he began working to develop Woodwinds six years ago. “I’ve been going to the Legislature for years, and I say, ‘We have 3,000 people in your district who are homeless. Can we count on your support this year?’ And we never get any enthusiasm. It’s always, ‘Yeah, we’ll have to see where the budget ends up.’”
The Sadowski Act, named after a former lawmaker and state government official killed in a 1992 plane crash, was passed that year amid growing concern over Florida’s rapid development. Using a small surcharge on real-estate transactions, the act called for the money to be divided among local and state government. It’s supposed to be spent on affordable housing construction, renovations, rental assistance, emergency repairs and help with down payments and closing costs for first-time home-buyers.
This past session, data from the nonprofit Florida Housing Coalition shows, Orange County government alone should have received $14.4 million from the trust fund to spend on affordable housing for its low-income residents.
Instead, it got $1.8 million.
Similarly, in Lake County, where Woodwinds was built, the allocation should have been $3.6 million. Instead, it was $545,000.
Osceola had similar numbers. And Seminole was due nearly $5 million — and got $697,000.
According to Jaimie Ross, the Florida Housing Coalition’s president and CEO, the $2.1 billion total diverted over the years would have funded the construction of an additional 94,000 affordable housing units in the state.
At an average of 2.5 people per unit, that’s 235,000 people — and the creation of nearly 216,000 jobs.
The total economic impact for Florida: $28,329,734,587.
“It has just become a habit,” Ross said of the annual raids on the fund. “When there was a [state budget] deficit it was like, ‘Oh, there’s a large pot of money we can use …’ But when there was a surplus, we expected all the trust fund money will be used for housing. Well, it wasn’t.”
Ross isn’t just referring to the expectations of her own coalition, which acts as a clearinghouse for information, a provider of training and technical assistance and an advocate for affordable housing. Her group is one of 30 organizations known as the Sadowski Coalition — which includes such industry and trade groups as the Florida Apartment Association, Florida Bankers Association, Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Home Builders Association, Florida Realtors and Florida Retail Federation — as well as nonprofits representing veterans, the elderly and people with disabilities. All support leaving the Sadowski Trust Funds for their intended purpose.
“We won’t be able to staff our [businesses] if there aren’t places for our people to live,” said Nanette Fountain, managing partner of Carrabba’s Italian Grill in Clermont. “They’re living out of their cars. I have people living on couches with relatives. These are not people who are bad. They’re not criminals. They’re not drug addicts. They’re [working] moms and dads and families that need somewhere to go.”
Lawmakers have a constitutional obligation to balance the state budget, and they have routinely tapped other trust funds, too, to do so. In this year’s budget, for instance, they transferred some $392 million from funds intended for everything from insurance regulation to air pollution control to indigent criminal defense, adding it to the general revenue fund.
Calls to several key senators on the subject were not returned.
Last session, a bill introduced by state Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, to stop the practice died in a subcommittee.
But there are plans to try again this year.
“Every year the Realtors and the homebuilders are in Tallahassee lobbying to keep the Sadowski funds intact — and every year they’re stolen,” said Dick Batchelor, a former state legislator who now works as a consultant and advocate on children’s issues. “The lawmakers keep saying that the lack of affordable housing is a crisis, and then given the chance to do something, they turn around and steal the money. It’s disingenuous.”
To be sure, there are thousands of housing units that are labeled affordable — made so through federal tax credits — but it’s the Sadowski money that often allows the properties to rent at lower rates. Without the state subsidies, even so-called affordable housing is out of reach to many workers and those on fixed incomes.
At Woodwinds, priced from $410 to $843 a month, half of the units are set aside for formerly homeless people, such as Elliott. Now 40, at his most desperate he slept under an Interstate 4 overpass, suffering from deep depression and reeling from a bus-station robbery that took all his identification and what was left of his cash.
New Beginnings helped him find faith, a job, a support community and, after two years in transitional housing, a home. He’s currently an assistant manager for a gas station and food mart while attending college for a degree in business management.
One of his future Woodwinds neighbors, Anna Clifton, is a widowed mother of two, who also became homeless after her husband died and she developed colon cancer. A former foster child, she had no family to rescue her.
“We lived out of shelters, hotels, a back bedroom. … The three of us shared a bed for almost a year,” said Clifton, 38.
She’s now on a scholarship to become a dental hygienist, attending classes on weekends while working two jobs and raising her kids. She has already qualified for a three-bedroom unit at Woodwinds, where she’ll pay $843 a month.
“Affordable, workforce housing is the greatest need we have,” said Smith, who recently relinquished leadership of New Beginnings to focus on his new nonprofit, Provident Housing Solutions. His next project is a 70-unit complex in Lake County for seniors, but he’s already eyeing property in Osceola County and Apopka for working-age adults and families.
“Six years ago, I worried we wouldn’t fill this place,” he said of Woodwinds. “Instead it filled in one week, and a week later we had 400 names on a waiting list. … My problem was that I didn’t dream big enough.”
Article last accessed on October 5, 2018 here. A print-ready version is available here.