MARKET FOCUS Need For Affordable Housing at ‘Crisis Level’ in Miami Developers are attempting to satisfy the nearly insatiable demand in America’s most unaffordable city. John Nelson M agic City. Gateway to the Americas. Vice City. Miami has many nicknames, but perhaps its most unfortunate moniker is “most unaffordable large city in the United States.” About 57 percent of Miami households are defined as “housing cost burdened,” meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing and related costs. That’s the larg -est figure for any major market in the country, according to research from Jorge M. Perez Metropolitan Center at Florida International University (FIU). Additionally, about 32 percent of Miamians are deemed “severely housing cost burdened,” as they spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. The affordability problem has deepened over the past 20 years, according to Ned Murray, associate director of the Metropolitan Center. In 2000, the share of housing cost-burdened house -holds in Miami was 48.7 percent. But the housing boom in the mid 2000s and an influx of significant foreign investment after the Great Recession caused Miami’s housing prices on both the single-family and multifam -ily fronts to skyrocket the past 15 years. Father Marquess-Barry Apartments is a 60-unit affordable seniors housing community underway in Miami’s Overtown district. The project’s developer, Housing Trust Group, plans to open the community this summer. “Affordability wasn’t seen as big of an issue before 2005,” says Murray, who is one of the contributing authors of the “Miami Afford -able Housing Master Plan,” the city’s unofficial guidelines for addressing the need for more affordable housing. Miami is a renter’s market, ranking consis -tently in the top three cities in terms of renters per capita. Murray says that approximately 70 percent of Miami residents rent as opposed to owning their own house or condominium, and this figure comprises those seeking high-end luxury living to those who rent because being a homeowner is cost-prohibitive. On top of that, the existing supply of af -fordable housing is in jeopardy. The FIU Metropolitan Center research found that Miami lost an average of 1,286 affordable units annu -ally between 2015 and 2019. “Miami is ground-zero for the nationwide af -fordable housing crisis,” says Matthew Rieger, president and CEO of Housing Trust Group (HTG). “Every time we bring a new property on line in Miami, we immediately lease up that property and move into a triple-digit waiting list for available units. We are unfortunately not bringing units on line anywhere near fast enough to meet the incredible demand for hous -ing in Miami.” Over the past 12 months, the COVID-19 pan -demic and recession in 2020 only deepened the plight for Miami’s population of affordable housing residents. The city is an internationally renowned tourism market and also is heavily dependent on its service-sector economy. Mi -ami businesses have suffered greatly as leisure travel has been severely hampered. As a result, the frontline workers at stores, restaurants, bars and cruise ships either lost their jobs or had their hours scaled back severely. “The people who live in affordable units were the first to lose their jobs,” says Rieger. He adds that companies such as Uber and Lyft are the No. 1 employer for HTG’s resident base, thus the firm’s renters have had a hard time making ends meet as ridesharing demand stymied amid the pandemic. According to a 2020 Affordable Housing Needs Assessment by the Metropolitan Center on behalf of Miami Homes for All, there is a gap of 121,820 units in Miami-Dade County that are affordable to renters earning zero to 50 percent of area median income (AMI). The needs assess -ment forecasts that if pre-pandemic trends for micro-economic factors such as population and job growth remain intact, that gap will shoot to more than 160,000 by 2030. “What’s been over-developed in the past decade in Miami is the high-end housing and not enough attention was paid to lower AMI,” says Stephanie Berman, president and CEO of Carrfour Supportive Housing. www.REBusinessOnline.com Terra and Grass River Property recently broke ground on Grove Central in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. At least 15 percent of Grove Central’s 402 apartments will be reserved as workforce housing, according to the developers. 20 | Southeast Affordable Housing Business | March/April 2021