ahac-incentive-strategies-july-2024
Ahac Incentive Strategies July 25, 2024
Introduction
The July 25, 2024 AHAC Incentive Strategies document, sponsored by the Florida Housing Finance Corporation through its Catalyst Program, serves as an essential guide for Affordable Housing Advisory Committees across Florida. This comprehensive resource outlines the statutory responsibilities of AHACs, details eleven mandatory incentive strategies required under Florida Statute 420.9076(4), and provides practical implementation guidance to help local governments effectively facilitate affordable housing development while maintaining compliance with State Housing Initiative Partnership (SHIP) funding requirements.
Core AHAC Responsibilities and Compliance Framework
Affordable Housing Advisory Committees function as critical policy advisory bodies mandated by Florida law for all jurisdictions receiving SHIP funds. Their primary statutory obligation centers on producing an annual report that reviews existing local policies, procedures, ordinances, land development regulations, and comprehensive plans affecting housing affordability.
Crucially, SHIP funding remains contingent upon AHAC activity—jurisdictions failing to produce an annual incentive strategies report fall out of compliance and become ineligible for new funding allocations.
The AHAC Incentive Strategies must approve its final report through an affirmative majority vote taken during a public hearing, ensuring transparency and community engagement in the affordable housing policy process.
The committee's fundamental purpose extends beyond mere bureaucratic compliance. AHAC Incentive Strategies serve as strategic advisors tasked with identifying regulatory barriers to affordable housing development and recommending targeted reforms that reduce development costs, increase housing supply, and expand access to affordable units for households earning up to 120% of Area Median Income (AMI).
Effective AHAC Incentive Strategies leverage the development expertise of their members—including builders, planners, housing advocates, and residents—to conduct thorough regulatory reviews and craft actionable recommendations that meaningfully impact local housing markets.
The Eleven Statutory Incentive Strategies: A Comprehensive Framework
Florida Statute 420.9076(4) mandates that AHAC Incentive Strategies evaluate and recommend improvements across eleven specific incentive categories. Two strategies—expedited permitting and the ongoing regulatory review process (housing impact statements)—carry special significance as required implementation areas, though all eleven strategies represent interconnected tools for advancing housing affordability.
Expedited Permitting represents a foundational cost-reduction strategy recognizing that time equals money in development. By accelerating approval timelines for affordable housing projects beyond standard processing speeds, local governments directly reduce soft costs including financing carry costs, professional fees, and administrative expenses.
Best practices include establishing clear eligibility criteria defining "affordable housing projects," designating an ombudsman to shepherd projects through interdepartmental approvals, and expediting every development phase from site plan review through final inspections. Forward-thinking jurisdictions broaden eligibility beyond subsidized developments to include any project containing a defined percentage of units affordable to households up to 120% AMI.
Fee Waivers and Modifications offer direct financial relief through multiple mechanisms permitted under the Florida Impact Fee Act (F.S. 163.31801). AHAC Incentive Strategies can recommend full waivers, partial waivers based on income tiers (e.g., 100% waiver for units serving households below 80% AMI with 50% mitigation for 80–120% AMI units), fee deferrals until unit occupancy or sale, or fee modifications based on unit size rather than per-unit charges.
Creative approaches include Polk County's tiered waiver structure, Collier County's deferral system tied to homestead status, and Orlando's strategy of using SHIP funds to directly pay impact fees up to $5,082 per unit. Critical policy considerations include establishing appropriate affordability periods, compliance monitoring protocols, and ensuring fee relief translates to actual rent or purchase price reductions.
Density Flexibility unlocks housing supply by permitting more units per acre, particularly when paired with complementary reforms to parking, setbacks, and lot configuration standards. Successful density bonus programs require careful local analysis: understanding current maximum densities, studying where developers actually build to those limits, identifying restrictive secondary regulations preventing density realization, and engaging private sector stakeholders about desired entitlements.
Palm Beach County's workforce housing program exemplifies effective implementation, offering density increases up to 100% based on affordability levels with streamlined approval for bonuses under 50%. AHAC Incentive Strategies should also explore statutory land use flexibility under F.S. 125.01055(6) and 166.04151(6), which permits affordable housing development on commercially zoned parcels without rezoning when at least 10% of units meet affordability criteria.
Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) represent a scalable missing-middle housing solution that expands supply without altering neighborhood character. Effective ADU ordinances allow these units by-right in all single-family districts without restrictive owner-occupancy requirements, permit flexible rental arrangements, establish reasonable size standards (800–1,200 square feet maximum with no minimums), minimize parking mandates, exempt ADUs from density calculations, and reduce minimum lot size thresholds.
St. Petersburg's iterative reforms—exempting ADUs from density counts, eliminating minimum sizes, expanding allowable locations, and collecting real-time permitting data—demonstrate how thoughtful zoning adjustments can catalyze ADU production.
Parking and Setback Reductions directly lower development costs while enabling greater unit counts. Parking reforms include eliminating minimums near transit corridors (Jacksonville's downtown elimination, St. Petersburg's transit-adjacent reductions), adopting parking maximums instead of minimums (Gainesville), or providing waivers for affordable developments.
Setback reductions facilitate duplexes, triplexes, and zero-lot-line configurations that maximize buildable area on smaller lots. Gainesville's 2023 reduction of side setbacks from 7.5 to 5 feet in RSF-4 districts enabled single-family construction on previously undevelopable small lots, illustrating how modest dimensional changes yield significant housing production gains.
Flexible Lot Configurations complement setback reforms through zero-lot-line allowances, attached/semi-detached housing permissions, cluster development options, and minimum lot size reductions.
Houston's 1998 reform lowering minimum single-family lot sizes from 5,000 to 3,500 square feet (with allowances down to 1,400 square feet) facilitated 25,269 new sub-5,000-square-foot residential parcels between 1999 and 2016, demonstrating the transformative potential of lot size reform when paired with appropriate housing type allowances.
Infrastructure Capacity Reservation addresses jurisdictions where water, sewer, or transportation concurrency constraints limit development potential. While often overlooked in AHAC reports, strategic infrastructure investment targeting underserved neighborhoods and requiring affordable housing components in developments utilizing publicly funded improvements can align growth management with equity goals. AHACs should assess long-range infrastructure plans and advocate for incorporating affordable housing considerations into capital improvement programming.
Transit-Oriented and Mixed-Use Development leverages existing infrastructure to reduce household transportation costs while creating walkable communities. This "catch-all" strategy proves particularly effective when implemented through overlay districts or base zoning reforms around employment centers and transit corridors.
Collier County's Transit Oriented Development Subdistrict permits 13 units per gross acre along transit routes with additional 12-unit density bonuses for affordable housing inclusion. Sarasota's Commercial Corridor Density Bonus Program creates Urban Mixed-Use zones allowing triple base density plus height bonuses when developments include 15% units affordable to 120% AMI households, with distribution requirements ensuring service to extremely low-income households.
Street Requirement Modifications address often-overlooked engineering standards that increase development costs. Allowing parking on one street side rather than both reduces road width requirements and associated drainage infrastructure. Tighter turning radii, reduced sidewalk widths in appropriate contexts, and flexible curb/gutter specifications can collectively redirect land area from infrastructure to housing units—particularly valuable for nonprofit developers where every square foot impacts project feasibility.
Publicly Owned Land Inventories connect to Florida's surplus land statutes (F.S. 125.379 and 166.0451), requiring jurisdictions to identify parcels "appropriate for affordable housing." AHAC Incentive Strategies can strengthen this process by establishing clear evaluation criteria addressing parcel size/shape, zoning compatibility, infrastructure availability, proximity to jobs/transit/services, and environmental risk factors.
Exemplary programs in Jacksonville, Miami-Dade County, Tampa, and St. Petersburg demonstrate how systematic land banking combined with disposition policies prioritizing permanent affordability can transform underutilized public assets into community housing resources.
Ongoing Regulatory Review Process (Housing Impact Statements) functions as a preventive policy tool requiring local governments to assess housing cost implications before adopting new regulations. Effective implementation involves designating staff responsibility, creating standardized housing impact statement forms, establishing screening protocols to identify potentially costly proposals (particularly zoning changes and fee policies), quantifying projected cost impacts, and presenting findings within commission meeting packages.
This process doesn't mandate policy rejection but ensures decision-makers possess complete information about regulatory tradeoffs affecting housing affordability.
Strategic Implementation Guidance and Best Practices
The document emphasizes that AHAC Incentive Strategies effectiveness stems from methodical, evidence-based approaches rather than attempting comprehensive reform annually. Successful committees focus on several incentives per cycle, conduct thorough regulatory audits before recommending changes, leverage planning staff expertise to visualize regulatory impacts, form subcommittees for deep-dive analysis, and consistently evaluate policies through the lens of their effect on housing cost, quantity, or unit size.
Critical success factors include maintaining clear communication between housing and planning departments, establishing predictable approval processes rather than case-by-case negotiations where possible, implementing robust compliance monitoring for affordability covenants, and ensuring incentive benefits translate to actual consumer price reductions rather than developer windfalls.
The document also encourages AHAC Incentive Strategies to transcend the eleven statutory categories by functioning as community forums, policy think tanks, or oversight bodies tracking implementation outcomes—recognizing that advisory committees can drive meaningful change when empowered with adequate staff support and commission engagement.
Conclusion: Advancing Florida's Affordable Housing Mission
The July 25, 2024 AHAC Incentive Strategies framework positions local advisory committees as indispensable catalysts for regulatory reform that expands housing opportunity across Florida's diverse communities. By systematically evaluating development regulations through an affordability lens, recommending targeted incentive strategies grounded in local market conditions, and maintaining vigilant oversight of implementation outcomes, AHACs fulfill their statutory mandate while advancing the broader mission of making housing accessible to Floridians across the income spectrum.
The document's practical guidance—illustrated through real-world examples from jurisdictions statewide—provides committees with actionable pathways to transform regulatory barriers into opportunities for inclusive, sustainable community growth. Ultimately, effective AHAC Incentive Strategies engagement represents not merely a SHIP compliance requirement but a strategic investment in community resilience, economic vitality, and housing justice.
LEAVE A REPLY