Pushback Against Florida's Live Local Act Grows

More states are discovering that bypassing local zoning officials to facilitate the building of new affordable and middle-income housing is a sure-fire way to generate pushback from the NIMBY crowd.

California’s builder’s remedy, the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency loophole the state housing agency is enforcing to force cities to meet its new housing mandates has generated a series of legal challenges that are making their way through the courts in the Golden State.

In the Empire State, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ambitious plan to build 800,000 new housing units by forcing municipalities to increase housing density died in the state legislature last year without a vote due to fierce opposition from suburban districts.

Last spring, in a bipartisan agreement, Florida’s state legislature passed a measure called the Live Local Act, which allows developers to bypass local zoning rules and qualify for tax breaks if their projects include enough workforce housing.

Under the law, enacted in July, Florida counties and municipalities must now allow multifamily or mixed-use residential developments to be built in commercial, industrial or mixed-use zones if the proposed rental development provides at least 40% affordable housing units for a period of at least 30 years.

The Live Local Act already is generating some local thunderstorms in the Sunshine State.

Whitman Family Development, the owner of Bal Harbour Shops, a mall filled with luxury outlets in the oceanside village of Bal Harbour north of Miami Beach, has been trying for several decades to build a hotel next to mall.

Local officials and village residents have consistently blocked the project, which would be located on Collins Avenue, the main street of the village. The mall was built by Whitman in 1965.

Now, armed with the provisions of the Live Local Act, Whitman has filed an application to build a 20-story hotel and three residential towers encompassing 600 units, 240 of which would be priced low enough to qualify as workforce housing under the new law.

The residents of Bal Harbour, with a population of about 3,100 and a median household income of $86K, well above the state average, turned out in force at a packed meeting of the Village Council to oppose the project.

According to a report in the New York Times, the attendees at the council meeting were “infuriated” and the council, which felt “ambushed,” vowed to try to stop the project.

Whitman Family Development is now suing the village in what is believed to be the first legal action asking the courts to enforce the Live Local Act.

The uprising against the new law is rapidly spreading, according to the report. When the owners of the Clevelander Hotel on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach proposed adding a restaurant and a 30-story residential tower, the pushback induced them to scale it back to 18 stories.

Commissioners in Pasco County, north of Tampa, have voted to sue any developer that tries to invoke the Live Local Act to build apartments on industrial or commercial property.

Doral and Florida City, two municipalities in Miami-Dade County, temporarily suspended all development after the law was passed, the report said.

According to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, renters in the Miami metro are the most cost-burdened in the U.S. and Florida is the most unaffordable state for renters, based on a study of the number of people spending more than 30% of household income on housing.