By: Treasure Coast Newspapers Editorial Board | TC Palm
At $230,000, according to Zillow.com, the average home in Florida is no bargain. In many cases, rentals are unaffordable, too.
In fact, more than 911,000 very low-income households spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing.
“They are one missed paycheck away from homelessness,” according to the Sadowski Housing Coalition, an advocate for affordable housing.
In 1992, the Florida Legislature increased taxes on real estate transactions and funded what’s called the Sadowski state and local housing trust funds to help subsidize rents and down payments for low-income Floridians.
Through 2001, the trust fund money was spent as intended. Since then, as the Panama City News Herald reported in May, the Legislature has taken $2.2 billion from the funds and spent it on unrelated programs. About $182 million was raided from the fund in fiscal 2019.
Sen. Debbie Mayfield, R-Rockledge, hopes to end the looting with her recently filed Senate Bill 70. It’s a bipartisan proposal that hopefully will fare better than similar ones in recent years.
If the Legislature is serious about spending money where it was intended — in this case, programs such as the State Apartment Incentive Loan Program and the State Housing Initiatives Partnership Program — it should pass Mayfield’s bill.
Article last accessed here on January 29, 2019. A print-ready version is available here.