The four candidates for Orange County’s most powerful office agree that more must be done to build housing in a region where rental and purchase prices are too high for working families and first-time home buyers.
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But the contenders for mayor have differing views on how to do so, with plans ranging from speeding up county permitting to leveraging local and state funding and more aggressively deploying county trust fund dollars for affordable housing.
Election Day is Aug. 17, and all Orange County voters will have a choice among Chris Messina, Tiffany Moore Russell, Stephanie Murphy and Mayra Uribe. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidates will have a runoff on Nov. 3. Early voting begins Aug. 3.
Orange County’s housing crisis spans the price spectrum.
The median sale price in June was $409,631, according to the Orlando Regional Realtor Association, while the average rental price for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,795, according to Rent.com.
And the Orlando metro area – spanning Sanford to Kissimmee – has one of the worst markets for rentals priced for people with extremely low incomes, with just 13 units available for every 100 families that need one, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Murphy and Uribe both said that county bureaucracy is partially to blame, contending that it takes builders too long to get housing developments approved, and that drives up costs. Home builders and apartment developers have long bristled at the difficulties in getting their plans approved and built there. Both said fixing that process is a top priority.
“Every day that goes by, the cost to build goes up,” Uribe said.
Murphy said permitting delays can increase the price of housing anywhere from 25% to 40%, and that is passed down to buyers and renters.
“The county has a significant role in ensuring there’s an adequate supply … thereby driving down the cost of housing,” she said.
Uribe has some of the most specific plans and intends to tap a new funding source to help. She wants to incentivize home builders to construct smaller and mid-sized homes which can be sold at prices affordable to working families, she plans to leverage state housing dollars to subsidize rents at private apartments to help more people afford them, and she wants to lobby state lawmakers to allow some of the county’s Tourist Development Tax revenue to be used for housing.
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She said if the county was able to use $45 million of the TDT – roughly 12% of the nearly $385 million collected last year – the county could build more than 200 affordable units annually. That money is currently reserved for uses deemed to support tourism, and Uribe has long been a critic of the restrictions.
Murphy, a former congresswoman, is looking to push harder on some programs the county already has in place. She said the county should be more aggressively deploying money from its Housing For All Trust Fund – which was created as a key priority for Mayor Jerry Demings. While the fund has contributed more than $55 million toward the creation of more than 2,200 units, Murphy said more creativity is needed to maximize its impact.
She favors denser developments in urban centers that already have roads and infrastructure, as opposed to sprawling subdivisions away from services, and wants to work with employers to build workforce housing.
Moore Russell, the current Clerk of Court and a former county commissioner, believes changes in land use policies can encourage more home building. She wants the county to embrace inclusionary zoning, which provides incentives to housing developers to keep a percentage of rents at a rate more people can afford.
She said the county needs scores more homes across every price point to drive down costs, and she wants to increase rental subsidies.
She also wants to examine its zoning policies to allow housing in more places.
“What can we do to reclassify areas to create more more housing?” she said.
Rather than provide direct rental subsidies, Messina, the line Republican in the race, wants to target blighted parcels for improvement. He said the county should identify blighted and abandoned strip malls and county-owned buildings and push for them to be redeveloped into mixed-income housing. He also said the county should work with the City of Orlando to rejuvenate Church Street in downtown with new developments featuring housing.
“I think the county has been completely reactive in terms of development,” he said.
In addition, Messina argues the county should be more cooperative with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, contending that people living here undocumented are contributing to rising housing costs.
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