By Kristina Webb  |  The Palm Beach Post

WEST PALM BEACH — A “stunning number” of state dollars dedicated to housing issues have been scraped away by Florida lawmakers for the past decade — and it’s time for that to stop, advocates said last week.

More than $2 billion over the past 10 years have been taken out of the Sadowski Trust Fund, a fund originally intended to pay for housing programs and improvements, said Suzanne Cabrera, president and CEO of the Housing Leadership Council of Palm Beach County.

That’s money that could go toward helping thousands of low-income Palm Beach County residents secure more consistent, safe places to live, she said. The county faces a dire need for workforce housing for low- and middle-income households, including seniors, young families and millennials, advocates say.

Cabrera and Tallahassee lobbyist Bryan Cherry spoke to local lawmakers and nonprofits at a recent affordable housing workshop where they rallied the dozens of people in attendance to do lobbying of their own to convince state lawmakers to stop “sweeping” money from the Sadowski Trust Fund into general revenue each year.

The trust fund was created in 1992 by realtors, homebuilders and affordable housing advocates to use taxes on real estate transactions including document stamps to pay for housing programs, Cabrera said.

All money from the fund was used for its intended purpose until just before the Great Recession, when lawmakers first voted to cap the fund, then started using the fund to help balance Florida’s budget, Cabrera said.

But lawmakers soon went from using the trust fund to balance the budget and to pad it instead, Cabrera said.

Last year alone, Palm Beach County received $2 million of the $17 million it should have received from the fund, she said.

“It’s something that just seems so unjust to me,” Cabrera said, adding, “I think that $15 million could have helped a lot of people last year.”

Palm Beach County’s housing market is unique thanks to the wide rift between income levels, she said. While median and average incomes would be good measures of housing needs in other communities, there’s such a disparity between low-income and wealthy households in Palm Beach County that those numbers skew higher than they should be, Cabrera said.

The median income – upon which affordable housing program rents are based – is $75,400, and the average income is $52,745.

But Cabrera pointed to the largest employer in Palm Beach County, the school district, where the base teacher salary is $41,000 a year. And the average income of the occupation with the most positions in the county, retail workers, is $23,234.

“We’re really seeing tremendous cost burden in Palm Beach County,” Cabrera said.

The money from the Sadowski fund could be used in Palm Beach County for programs to help seniors age in place, subsidize moving costs and provide emergency mortgage help, Cabrera said.

She wonders if Palm Beach County would have an affordable housing problem if it had received full Sadowski funding.

“We need to get our money back,” she said.

No bill would be required for the legislature to stop taking the money. It would, however, take buy-in from the governor, Senate and House. So far, Cabrera said, Sadowski advocates have the governor and Senate on board.

She encouraged those at the workshop to contact their lawmakers to encourage them to join the movement. If enough people hear their message, change could happen, she said.

“People will become outraged and say, ‘Let’s get our money back,’” Cabrera said.

She said she received at least one key pledge of support at the workshop, from state Rep. Rick Roth, R-West Palm Beach. “He said this is going to be his issue,” Cabrera said.

Article last accessed on November 13, 2019 here. A print-ready version is available here.