By: The Editorial Board | Florida Today
Adonius Glover was working full time as a restaurant cook in Brevard County when he found himself living out of his car for a week in 2017 with his two children — now ages 10 and 8.
He earned $9.50 a hour, not enough to cover daily expenses, pay child support for another child and save for an application fee, as well as the first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit for an apartment. Not to mention an eviction from years ago made it even harder for Glover. So after bouncing between the homes of family and friends, he had no alternative but his car.
Glover, 33, is not the stereotypical face of homelessness. He didn’t end up in the streets because of substance abuse or mental illness. He’s not a beggar on the side of the road. He had a full-time job.
Like Glover, there are many families who can’t afford housing. Others are living right on the edge — a rent increase or unexpected expense could knock them into homelessness.
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Florida has the third largest homeless population in the country. The number of “cost burdened” renters — those paying more than the recommended 40 percent of their income for rent and utilities — climbed 35 percent from 2005 to 2015, according to the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida.
Fewer residents are buying homes, in particular after the Great Recession, flooding the market with more renters and driving up costs.
The Legislature and former Gov. Rick Scott didn’t address this issue with the urgency it requires. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed budget for the 2019-20 fiscal year has shown he understands the gravity of the problem.
DeSantis has proposed full funding for Florida’s Sadowski Housing Trust Fund, created in 1992 to increase affordable housing with revenue from documentary stamp taxes levied on real estate transactions.
Lawmakers since the early 2000s have raided that pot of money to plug budget holes and pay for other priorities. That’s $2.2 billion used for unrelated purposes statewide — $19.5 million of that was supposed to go to Brevard since 2013to increase affordable housing.
Even if lawmakers this year agree with DeSantis’ proposal to preserve the Sadowski fund, we don’t trust them to maintain that commitment in the future.
That’s why DeSantis should also make it a priority to sign Brevard County Republican Sen. Debbie Mayfield’s bill to ban the Legislature from raiding the trust fund. A similar bill was introduced in the last legislative session but died, despite receiving bipartisan support.
It’s hard to say whether the $19.5 million that was diverted would have prevented Glover from becoming homeless, but it certainly would have given people like him options.
Waiting for market forces to make rent and home prices more affordable hasn’t worked. Only 15 percent of 852,000 new rental units built statewide in 2015 were affordable to poor renters, according to the Shimberg Center.
There’s no return on investment for developers to build housing for the poor without incentives. That’s why one of the purposes of the Sadowski fund is to subsidize the construction of affordable homes.
When our social safety nets fail, people like Glover often turn to nonprofits, such as Family Promise of Brevard, which placed him in temporary shelter for 45 days and helped him secure a two-bedroom apartment in Merritt Island. Glover is now applying for a permanent home through Habitat for Humanity.
But nonprofits themselves are facing dwindling budgets. The Brevard County Commission cut its allocation to Family Promise from $37,000 to $5,000 in 2017. The commission has voted to phase out all funding for nonprofits by 2021.
Keeping the Sadowski fund intact isn’t a big-government solution or a handout. It simply means respecting its intent as agreed by lawmakers in 1992. The Sadowski Act created a 10-cent tax on every $100 in real estate transfers (it also redirected 10 cents from existing tax revenue). Raiding those dollars has turned this tax into a slush fund for lawmakers.
Dollars from the Sadowski fund are passed on to local governments and can be used to subsidize rents, rehabilitate aging homes for low-income residents and help them with down payments.
With shrinking funding, Brevard County has had to pick and choose which projects it can fund. Last year, if the Sadowski dollars had not been raided for other projects, Brevard would have received $6.3 million but instead received only $846,000, according to the county’s Housing and Human Services Department.
DeSantis’ budget proposal has broken with precedent on affordable housing, but his commitment will be tested when lawmakers begin writing a state budget in the March legislative session. That’s when he will show which issues are important enough for him to pressure lawmakers.
You can help by contacting your House and Senate representatives and asking them to leave the Sadowski fund alone. Visit myfloridahouse.gov and flsenate.gov to find out who they are.
Article last accessed here on February 22, 2019. A print-ready version is available here.