Tuesday's was the last Key West City Commission meeting in the 20th century! I only wish we had made more progress in the 14 years since I began attending them.
ROGO (Rate of Growth Ordinance), for example. You'd think they'd have this growth-quota thing in hand by now. Fourteen years ago the commissioners decided— under mandate from the same sages who brought us the school funding windfall via Florida lottery— to limit the number of new residences that could be built in this town, to somewhere around 91 units per year.
This created a mandatory shortage of residential housing, which is good, because it meant that we landlords could raise our rates. Tenants could either pay up or lump it.
Many working stiffs left for Ocala and points north, but the tourists kept coming, because they don't mind paying our outrageous rents for a week or two. They're on vacation!
Subsequently, a lot of rooming houses and former homes became guest houses. Hotels continued to be built (despite vigorous growth control lobbying from the hotel-motel people.) Bed-and-breakfasts and transient rentals flourished in the neighborhoods. But the problem of "affordable housing" for workers only got worse.
Suddenly, all kinds of illegal activities began— unpermitted week-end handyman specials, where a garage, pool house or storage unit was transformed into a mother-in-law worker's apartment or a transient rental. Hotel "suites" were built with doors which locked to instantly make multiple "single" rooms. People rented out— long-term, short-term, any-term— accessory "mother-in-law" units in areas not zoned multi-family.
Developers were under the gun, and they invented whole new ingenious ways of interp"density" and "unit" and "affordable" and "historic," to get around the newly-imposed housing quotas.
The City Commission— I noticed Tuesday night as it discussed and denied the appeal of a six-unit builder at 1315 Pine St.— is fighting the municipal equivalent of the War On Drugs— and it is losing! Why? Because residential demand continues to rise.
Conchs won't stop having babies, and babies don't want to stay at Nana's house after they hit 25 and especially not after they get hitched. Aged parents from New York visit, fall in love with the Keys, move in. City managers, planners and cops are imported from Nevada, Georgia and beyond. Inconceivably, they all clamor for a place to stay! (Couldn't they just commute or something?)
Commissioners are trying their damnedest to prevent housing from being built, but just like drug control, success eludes them so long as there are "housing addicts" out there willing to flaunt the law and pay good rents for unlicensed, unpermitted, unzoned units— even at the current "unaffordable" rates. (Those people who have cast off the chains of "housing addiction" sadly lost their best chance for a Tent City 12-step program when Sheila Mullins left office.)
The solution seems inescapable. Sooner or later the War On Housing will have to be redirected by the City Commission against the people whose demand continues to fuel the scofflaw developers and their relentless attacks on ROGO.
First, the Commission will have to bite the bullet and make ROGO violations a criminal offense. They must get some of that law enforcement grant money offered by Bill Clinton for more cops to enforce domestic tranquility in America (and keep divers off the reef).