By Sarah Hollenbeck  |  WFTS Tampa Bay

PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — It’s a crisis growing worse by the day. Hundreds of families in Tampa Bay are on waiting lists for affordable housing. Now, communities across the state could be at risk of losing millions of dollars meant to fund new affordable housing projects.

Sabrina Tisdale of Clearwater has been without a stable place to live for four years. Hurricane Irma destroyed her rental home and since then, she’s hopped from one hotel to the next.

“I can’t find anything that’s reasonable because they say you have to have two or three times the income to prove you can pay rent, so it’s outrageous,” she said with a sigh.

Tisdale’s story is too common in Tampa Bay. In Pinellas County alone, there’s an estimated shortage of 54,000 affordable housing units.

Jaimie Ross, the CEO of Florida Housing Coalition, says those numbers represent something deeper.

“They represent families that aren’t going to be able to be housed and people who end up becoming homeless,” she explained.

Yet, at a time when Florida’s housing crisis is at its worst, two proposals currently being considered in the house and senate would permanently cut affordable housing funds from $423 million a year statewide to $141 million. Of that, $41 million would be cut from Tampa Bay.

Bowen Arnold of DDA Development Company in Tampa says that would be a huge loss. His company works on affordable housing projects, and he says it makes up about 20-25% of their overall construction.

“To have this is kind of a punch to the stomach, I think, to the affordable housing industry for sure,” he elaborated.

Without that money, developers like Arnold say building new affordable projects would be nearly impossible. The affordable housing units are meant to look and feel just like the market rate, which means they’re just as expensive to build but make less money from tenant rent coming in.

“It could be a significant hit. A lot of the projects we are looking at that are affordable have to have some kind of component of subsidy either from local government or from the state,” Arnold added.

Lawmakers are proposing cutting the Sadowski Housing Trust Fund, which historically has been swiped for other purposes for years, into three parts. If passed, only one-third would go to affordable housing. The rest would tackle flooding, sea-level rise and wastewater initiatives.

That’s upsetting for housing advocates.

“Everyone knows we have a huge housing crisis, especially post-COVID. We have an inadequate supply of affordable housing, and we desperately need the Sadowski Trust Fund money to help with that so it couldn’t come at a worst time. Flooding, sea-level rise and wastewater initiatives are important, but there’s no reason to use housing trust fund money for these purposes,” Ross added.

ABC Action News reached out repeatedly to the two lawmakers sponsoring the bills, Speaker of the House Chris Sprowls and Senate President Wilton Simpson. We never heard back from either legislator.

Housing advocates hope they’ll be able to convince them to change their minds, thereby giving people like Tisdale a chance.

“Everybody deserves a reasonable place to live and to call home,” Tisdale said.

Over the past decade, housing advocates say legislators have swept $1.5 billion from the housing trust fund for other purposes. Yet, this proposal would double that number over the next 10 years to $3 billion directed away from affordable housing.

Article last accessed here on March 31, 2021. A print-ready version is available here.