On December 20, 2016, the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners adopted Ordinance No. 16-138, which amended Chapter 33, Article XIIA (“Article XIIA”), entitled Workforce Housing Development Program. Article XIIA was amended in order to address what was identified as a “persistent” shortage of workforce housing and over concentrations of such housing in areas where it does exist. The changes instituted to Article XIIA included, among other provisions, making program participation mandatory and requiring municipalities within the County to either be subject to those provisions, develop their own or seek exemption due to:

“[w]orkforce housing is being adequately addressed, or that workforce housing would be impractical to provide due to issues such as but not limited to, the lack of availability of or the high value of vacant land or redevelopment sites.” (Section 33-193.7(A)(2) Miami-Dade County Code of Ordinances)

Municipalities desiring to adopt their own provisions where first required to submit a resolution by June 30, 2017 to Miami-Dade County (“County”) stating that implementation of Article XIIA would be impractical due to the unique circumstances of their respective jurisdictions. On June 6, 2017, the Town Council completed this task by adopting Resolution No. 17-1459 and transmitting same to the County on June 27, 2017, however, our intent then was to create our own work force housing ordinance.

In further studying the feasibility of creating our own work force housing policy, we discovered that the Town has only one remaining undeveloped commercial property (see Attachment), that is without site plan approval, that has the potential for development as a mixed-use commercial/residential project. This limited availability puts considerable constraint on the implementation of any workforce housing program. Further, the price of the lands discussed herein make implementation of a workforce housing program impractical. The starting price for a single family detached home in Miami-Lakes is $350,000 and goes to over $1,500,000. At such a price point, coupled with the availability, a workforce housing ordinance becomes unworkable.

Given the findings of this review as described above, it is not practical for the Town to implement workforce housing regulations due principally to the availability of land that may be developed and the cost of that land.