Here’s some wishful thinking. Wanted to Rent: One bedroom, one bath house or apartment. Long-term lease. Willing to pay security, first and last. Employed. Good references. Can afford up to $775 monthly. In Key West. Don’t have car. Need to be close to work.
Did that $775 a month make you snort your morning cereal out your nose? Thought so.
There hasn’t been rent that low in Key West since, well, probably the 1970s. This little island is one darned expensive place to live. In a place where folks can’t blink an eye at $2,500 a month for a teensy, not-so-great bungalow, condo or apartment, the idea of $750 rent is a pipe dream.
Key West recognizes it’s face-to-face with a housing crisis. There simply isn’t enough affordable or workforce housing on or near the island for the workers needed to sustain the local tourism economy.
Passage of the March 15 referendum asking Key West voters to approve the $55 million purchase of Peary Court and preserve its 160 homes as workforce housing has some potential – but the swirling controversy makes it difficult to sift through to the facts.
Key West’s long-term rental market is disappearing as single-family homes become the darlings of second-home owners who put them into the lucrative seasonal vacation rental pool. Many of these homes are rented for three or four months of the season, then sit empty or barely used the rest of the year.
I can’t blame new owners for wanting a piece of island paradise that might pay for itself. But every home or condo that’s not a permanent residence threatens the stability of Key West’s workforce.
Pricing the workforce – seasonal and long-term – out of Key West leaves us with no one to be the teachers, cops, service providers, retail workers, gardeners, chefs and refrigerator repair folks.
Florida defines affordable housing as “rent or mortgage payments, plus taxes and insurance, that don’t not exceed 30 percent of median gross income.” Hence the $775 figure. That’s what the state says an individual making Key West’s median income of about $31,000 can afford in rent. And, that’s a long cry from what’s on today’s market.
Workforce housing gets a bit more complicated and more expensive. Florida statutes say workforce housing ”means housing affordable to natural persons or families whose total annual household income does not exceed 140 percent of the area median income. …”
In Key West that means monthly rent in the neighborhood of $1,890 to $2,520, depending on whether the family, whose adjusted median household income is $75,600, wants to spend 30 or 40 percent each month on rent.
And those calculations bring us to Peary Court, a 29-acre parcel of prime real estate, right next to Old Town and a developer’s dream – if a developer could get designs through the city, the Historic Architectural Review Commission and Key West’s always-vocal residents.
Peary Court, in principle if not legal fact, is workforce housing. Rents are in the $2,400 range and people who work in Key West or serve in the military occupy the homes.
Peary Court has been the site of military housing of some sort since the 1800s. The U.S. Navy built today’s Peary Court in the early 1990s when the military said it needed housing. Twenty years later, in 2013, the Navy sold the 160-home Peary Court to White Street Developers, which planned to tear it down and replace the Navy-built homes with luxury development. Key West opposition killed those plans.
White Street Partners said “enough” and offered Peary Court to the city for $55 million, a whopping $20 million more than what they paid two years earlier.
On March 15, City of Key West voters will decide via referendum whether the city should purchase Peary Court and designate those homes forever as workforce housing. In true Key West fashion, the fors-and-agins are slugging it out in print and in social media, with the most common opposition argument being “we don’t trust the government.”
I’m not so sure I trust them either, and I have my doubts. But if the city doesn’t own it, Peary Court is going to another private developer. Eventually the high-end development will get built. When it does, its current residents will be displaced and there are no comparable relocation possibilities.
We can toss political hand grenades and re-open the door to housing stock Key West’s workforce cannot afford. Or we can preserve 160 homes for the people who do the work for all those tourists and second-home owners.
We need to fix this problem before there is no one left to pour the drinks, cook the seafood, teach the kids and police the streets. The Peary Court referendum has its flaws, but it’s better than doing nothing.
Linda Grist Cunningham is editor and proprietor of KeyWestWatch Media. She and her husband own a home just down the street from Peary Court.
Remember that childhood story, The Three Little Pigs, where the wolf huffed and puffed and blew away the houses built of sand and sticks?
It’s something of an allegory for those of us who’ve chosen to live and work on river banks, lake shores and seaside dunes. Ah, waterfront property. Two words that evoke daydreams and pump thousands of market value dollars into even a modest bungalow on the Jersey Shore, in the Keys, beside Lake Michigan or along the mighty Mississippi.
And, then along comes the big bad wolf. Think Hurricane Sandy or Katrina. Think Storm Surge Wilma in Key West in 2005. Pity old Henry Flagler whose railroad connected Key West to the mainland and fell apart forever in the 1935 hurricane.
Ought we allow any development in flood plains? Probably not. There’s not a lick of sense in building multistory high rises on a sand dune. Miami, Chicago and New York City come to mind, not to mention the bungalows of New Orleans and Key West. Even less sense in rebuilding it. But that dog done left the yard.
We are water-facing people and we pave over, build on top of and next to watersheds and flood plains. We plant a house and follow up with businesses to support it and entertain us. We look askance at the sprawl along the Outer Banks of North Carolina — and promptly rent a vacation home on the beach in September.
No one has the stomach for restoring the U.S. flood plains to pre-1492. It’s just not going to happen, so we best be exploring alternatives. For now, unfortunately, what we’re stuck with is federally subsidized flood insurance — and it’s broke.
In 2012, the U.S. Congress approved the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which was supposed to raise flood insurance rates high enough to replenish the National Flood Insurance Program. The federal government wanted out of the business of subsidizing flood insurance.
Then came the big “oops.” Oops, we had no idea how economically devastating those increases would be on home owners and businesses. So, after months of political wrangling, on March 21, President Barack Obama signed a relief bill that mitigates some of the rate increases built into Biggert-Waters.
Home owners who actually live in their flood plain homes will see their rates increase, but not at the staggering levels called for in Biggert-Waters. Instead of going up 25 percent per year for(almost)ever, they’ll increase a maximum of 18 percent annually.
Second home owners, businesses, houses of worship, not-for-profits and others, such as condos and rentals, remain on the 25-percent so-called glide path to full value premiums.
No matter how one computes it, if one has a mortgage on a property in a flood plain that requires insurance, the bills are headed up. Flood insurance premiums can climb from a few hundred to tens of thousands annually.
As they should, say the critics of federally subsidized insurance and many environmentalists. Build one’s house or business on sand? Next to water that big winds whip into monsters? Well, why should the rest of us pay for your folly?
(See previous paragraphs about the dog that left the yard for the answer).
Subsidized federal insurance is part of the solution. With last week’s relief bill, there are opportunities to find solutions that can protect the economic engines that line our shores, protect the home owner’s investment, while requiring equitable “skin in the game,” and protect the fragile environment.
But, if Obamacare dissonance becomes the script for national flood policies, we’re in for some very unpleasant political theater.
Linda Grist Cunningham is editor and proprietor of KeyWestWatch Media, a project management company. She lives in Key West (in house only a few feet about sea level and she pays for flood insurance even though it’s not required.)
The 420-square-foot, covered porch is a wonderful space, but wasn’t architecturally incorporated into the main house.
This view looking toward the stockade fence is taken from the aluminum-awning covered front stoop that will become the new kitchen.
Original front porch. It was nice but lacked style and privacy.
Key West Renovation: The beginning
The house had the seven things on the top of our home buyers’ wish list: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a pool, central air, off-street parking, enough outdoor space to buffer the neighbors and a great location in The Meadows.
We bought bank-owned 1310 Olivia St., Key West, in August 2008, just as the local real estate market went into free-fall after five years of insane speculation, flipping and fantasy pricing. Though the bottom came three years later, we purchased the property for about 50 percent of what it had been listed for two years earlier.
We saw potential in the nondescript, personality-deprived, concrete block rectangle built in 1953, but it needed some serious “lipstick” if it were to come into its own. Previous owners had tacked on porches and decks with little thought for architecture and design.
The house inside and out was a hodgepodge. For sure, it wasn’t the quintessential Key West cottage, nor did it want to be. Arts and Crafts bungalow? Maybe. Florida mid-century modern? Possibly. It was a blank slate and the bones were there.
Working with local architect Matthew Stratton, we spent three years developing the plans. We had full-time tenants in the house until we permanently relocated from Rockford, IL, to Key West in mid-2012. Demolition and construction of the project began Dec. 26, 2012.
These were our goals:
(1) Get the fundamentals right. That meant bringing electric, plumbing, foundations and mechanics up to code. Sixty years of wear-and-tear, surreptitious DIY projects and lack of professional maintenance had taken their toll.
(2) Develop an overall architectural style that would weave together the inside and outside hodgepodge into a seamless design;
(3) Do it right. That meant getting Historic Architecture Review Committee (HARC) approval and following to the letter the city codes.
This was our design philosophy:
A Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired, retro-modern-bungalow that meshes with the historic Meadows neighborhood and incorporates a pinch of Zen and a hint of the prairie.
Develop your umbrella brand. Start with a strong image.
Key West Realtor Brenda Donnelly owns two business brands: Island Homes Key West and Historic Key West Vacation Rentals. They serve different target markets, but the information needs of both clients often overlap. Donnelly sells homes, inns, bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses. She also markets and manages high-end vacation rental properties. Her home buyers often start as vacation home renters. She also maintains a companion blog.
Although the two businesses are separate, it’s easy to see the ways in which a vacation rental can turn into a home purchase — a home that may return to the vacation rental market under Donnelly’s management. Each business feeds the other.
The challenge is establishing an “umbrella” social brand that allows Donnelly to connect with both target audiences. She needs to speak to the specific needs of each target audience while easing them between renting and owning — all without duplicating information or draining her time and resources.
So, we are creating an umbrella brand that she can use across both companies. We’re starting with one, highly identifiable icon coupled with a strong branding statement: Stay a week. Stay a month. Stay a lifetime. We’ll add streamlined social media accounts that can “push-pull” friends and members across both businesses’ websites. Next step: Creating customized, original website and social media content for both target audiences.
Assuming the headline got your attention, stick with me for a minute. I haven’t totally lost my mind.
Public employees are the last fragments of the United States’ once robust middle class. If their jobs disappear, we can kiss our community farewell. That “tipping point” all the local movers-and-shakers talk about when they get together stops being talk pretty fast when there’s no middle class.
Long gone are the days when every house in Loves Park, IL, had an RV, a fishing boat and a map to Wisconsin’s north woods. Back then, manufacturing jobs paid upwards of $50,000, no high school, much less college, degree required. That was good money, job security and a solid, secure life for thousands of families.
So slowly that the transition was imperceptible to all but those looking for it, four decades of waning factory jobs took their toll on a long list of others dependent on that manufacturing middle class: accountants, lawyers, journalists, homeowners, auto dealers, preachers. You. Me.
At the same time, public employees — teachers, law enforcement, fire fighters, road crews, secretaries, marketing and development executives — bargained first for better benefits and then for better wages. Public employees went from barely paying the bills to middle class over those four decades.
Today, they’re all we’ve got left of a middle class, here and around the country. If the middle fails, expect the resulting black hole to suck the rest of us in.
So, it’s time to raise taxes to save those jobs. Every penny of such a tax increase goes directly to job creation (hire more probation officers, please) and job retention (you get to keep your job if you’re actually doing it well.)
Not a penny can go to salary increases: no steps, lanes, bargaining increases, cost of living. They’ve got to give those up, just like the private sector workers have done. For the next five years, public employees get to keep their jobs at the current salary — assuming, as I said before, they’re actually doing the job.
No layoffs for five years. No threats of job reductions. Just the security of knowing that a paycheck will keep coming — and that check can be used to remodel a kitchen, buy a car, take out a mortgage on a new house, pay down the credit cards, send the kid(s) off to higher education.
In turn, public employees have got to step it up. Make quality work and customer service the way it’s always done. Pick up more (a lot) for health care benefits and pensions. Work longer hours for the same pay. Learn new skills. Sit down and bargain in good faith to reduce costs (Four on a truck? Spare me) with those who pay your now secure paychecks.
The Tea Party tax-haters can scream from here to heaven and cast about for pointing fingers, but there’s this one gut-wrenching truth: The middle class is the glue that holds America together. These days, the only middle class left is public employees. If we trash and ditch them, we’re all going under.
Passage of the March 15 referendum asking Key West voters to approve the $55 million purchase of Peary Court and preserve its 160 homes as workforce housing has some potential – but the swirling controversy makes it difficult to sift through to the facts.
