Palm Beach County leaders push housing ideas to avoid losing workers .

Palm Beach County leaders push housing ideas to avoid losing workers .

By Andy Reid
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted July 13 2006


A coalition of Palm Beach County business leaders on Wednesday called for creating 98,000 new affordable homes during the next 20 years to avoid losing workers to less expensive areas.

The Housing Leadership Council, started by the Economic Council of Palm Beach County, unveiled a housing study showing what most already knew -- homes here cost too much and salaries are too low for workers to afford them.



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The study identified a $209,071 gap between what a typical Palm Beach County household can afford to buy and the median price of a house here.

It lays out the need for creating more homes priced for households that make between $26,000 and $63,000 a year.

The council calls the study a necessary first step to help government officials and other decision makers come up with solutions.

The group has yet to endorse specific ways to produce affordably priced homes but has patterned itself after a similar organization in Broward County.

The Broward Housing Partnership this year called for: creating a local housing trust fund, offering no-interest loans, encouraging development of rental housing, streamlining the development approval process and using more local tax dollars for housing efforts.

This fall, the Housing Leadership Council plans to propose affordable housing solutions for Palm Beach County.

"Everything is on the table," said attorney Arthur Menor, who serves on the steering committee of the Housing Leadership Council.

The study shows some "guilt" can be assigned in the affordable housing problem, County Commissioner Warren Newell said.

Businesses should have been paying their employees higher salaries and builders should offer less expensive homes, he said.

"Industry should have been recognizing this years ago," said Newell, who said he was labeled a "communist" for calling for more affordable housing five years ago. "Now we are all going to have to deal with it."

Businesses cannot afford to raise salaries high enough to catch up with home prices, representatives of the Housing Leadership Council said.

"The business community is not going to solve this problem," said Rod Macon, chairman of the Economic Council. "Our hope is that this becomes a community-wide effort."

Palm Beach County's "incessant development pattern" produces new homes priced too far out of reach of most residents, according to the study prepared by Dr. Ned Murray, an urban planning professor at Florida International University.

Murray's study also finds that rising home values leave few affordable options in existing neighborhoods.

The median sales price -- the point at which half are higher and half are lower -- in Palm Beach County was $392,900 during the first quarter of 2006.

That would be too expensive for about 90 percent of current Palm Beach County households, according to Murray.

The median household income in the county was $52,825, according to U.S. Census figures adjusted for inflation. The median annual wage for all occupations in the county was $27,851, according to the study.

"You see significant affordability gaps," Murray said. "We have produced a housing supply that is a complete mismatch ... with working residents."

The study included a survey of the top 50 employers in Palm Beach County and a sampling of about 150 other businesses. About 58 percent of those employers indicated that housing prices impacted their ability to recruit new employees. Forty-four percent indicated housing costs impacted their ability to retain employees.

Thousands of commuters travel to Palm Beach County for work each day, but local businesses run the risk of losing those employees as more companies spring up offering them jobs closer to home, said Kelly Smallridge, president of the Palm Beach County Business Development Board.

That already has some Palm Beach County companies considering moving to St. Lucie County and other places where land and home prices are cheaper, said Smallridge, on the steering committee of the Housing Leadership Council.

"It is not just an employee retention issue. It is also an employer retention issue," Smallridge said.