JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The housing and homelessness crises are connected to affordable housing, which is positioned to help more people make their way under a roof instead of being stranded under open skies.
There’s a serious need, and as we uncovered in this podcast, there’s more need than supply — even with various organizations trying to build up the industry.
Cody Spencer is an executive with Ability Housing.
“Ability Housing is an affordable housing developer that specializes and assists families in our community that have either previously experienced homelessness or a low income or extremely low income,” Spencer said. “We’ve been in business in Northeast Florida for over 30 years. We’ve recently expanded to Central and Southwest Florida and last year alone, we housed around 1,800 Floridians within our portfolio.”
While Ability Housing is a non-profit, Dominium is a for-profit entity also trying to build up homes in this space.
“Dominium is a large, affordable housing developer. We really were a for-profit company versus a nonprofit company. And what we really focus on is trying to solve the capacity issue of affordable housing and so we work within what’s considered the 4% bond space, which is a non-competitive tax credit to get our projects done,” Katessa Archer with Dominium said.
“We really focus on producing units that are around 200 300 unit projects to really help solve how much affordable housing is produced and how quickly it can come online. So Dominium has been in the business for over 50 years. We own just over 5000 units throughout Florida,” Archer said.
Part of the issue, however, is that 5,000 units throughout the entire state are just a drop in the bucket compared to the need.
Joe Carlucci, Jacksonville City Council District 5 and chairman of the Special Committee on Homelessness and Affordable Housing, said the local government has to lend a hand, and it’s past time to take action.
“I have all the studies here with me. I think we’re all studied out,” Carlucci said. “So the main goal of this is to start action, you start implementing the recommendations from these studies. And the number one recommendation that we had for affordable housing was gap funding. So a lot of these projects these deals don’t make sense because of the income or the rental amount on these units is so low, so the developers really have to go after grants, other types of funding mechanisms and recommendation after recommendation.”
Carlucci said the studies show that more gap funding is necessary which could could amount to millions.
“That can be as little as a million dollars or it can be as much as $5 million to make the deal work. So I’ve made a lot of progress on that. And that’s one of the one of the goals that we’re going to try and accomplish in this special committee,” he said.
Carlucci, Archer and Spencer are guests on this episode of This Week in Jacksonville: Business Edition. Clic k above to watch the podcast.