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Former Orlando Business Journal Editor-in-Chief Sean McCrory recently spoke with Catherine Steck McManus, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Greater Orlando & Osceola County, for the latest segment of the Florida Business Minds podcast.
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Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.
Click on the link below to access the free podcast. You can find more Florida Business Minds podcasts here.
The following is a brief excerpt from the interview, edited for brevity and clarity:
From your perspective what is the current state of the housing market in Orange and Osceola counties, where affordability is concerned, and what is Habitat for Humanity doing to address the issue?
Unfortunately, not a lot has changed. The housing market is still out of balance and distorted by conflicting policies and goals, as well. We're not always all on the same page, so to address this, we've launched Face the Housing Crisis, an initiative to tackle the affordable housing crisis in Central Florida. We're convening collective leaders and asking them to embrace the new approach that focuses on changing the housing system rather than individual policy. While taking things individually sounds attractive in isolation, there just is no one single bullet or single solution, so we have to approach it as a system.
What are the biggest factors contributing to the housing affordability crisis in Central Florida?
Well, one of the biggest factors is really we've got profit incentives, of course, that are driving developers and builders to meet the demand for building larger, more expensive housing because there are a lot of people in our community who can afford a half-a-million-dollar home.
But meanwhile, there are well-intended policies in our community that have created some disincentives to make building affordable housing more attractive, so even though I believe we have residential builders in our community that would be more than happy to build at the lower end right of the housing supply ladder, it just doesn't end up making any financial sense for them to do so.
It's very expensive to build homes right now, to acquire land. If you are Habitat, as a nonprofit, we can go into a deal knowing there is not going to be a profit at the end of the day. But it's going to take all builders and developers to come together to try and ensure we have the supply ladder we need, with various housing types and prices.
When we spoke at the beginning of this year, part of the discussion was on how the affordable housing crisis was hurting Central Florida in being able to compete with other markets for businesses and jobs. If an engineer cannot afford to live here comfortably, he or she is going to choose to locate elsewhere. Do you think the situation has changed much in the months since that conversation, and what more do our business leaders need to do to help address the housing crisis?
Unfortunately, it has just gotten worse — so yes, it has changed, but not for the better. So, our business community, I think — one of the things I say to so many people when we're just talking, right, we're just really being authentic and vulnerable with the crisis and talking about that, is to talk with their staff. Where are their struggles? Because sometimes I think our business leaders would be shocked — and not in a good way — by the struggles their staff are facing today.
If you are struggling financially with the cost of housing, when you come to work, it's going to be difficult to pay attention, and it's going to be difficult to exceed expectations. So, the first thing is talk with your team. Ask them where their hurdles are. Ask them if you can help find resources.
I'm not expecting the business community to have the answer and to solve or to fix all their staff’s housing problems — I mean, that's pretty Pollyanna-ish. But we can at least start the conversation. So, I would encourage everyone to start that conversation and then let me know. I would love to know what some of those hurdles are.
Then as a community, let's come together and see how we can try to connect the dots of where there are resources available. Because if we don't start having some of these conversations and having our industry leaders understand what it's like, we're only going to have our workers leave. They're already sort of leaving because they need to find affordable housing elsewhere, but we need them to stay. We need them also to want to come to Central Florida and work — so it starts there with the conversation.
This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Tune into the Florida Business Minds podcast episode above for the full interview.
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