It's taken more than three years of messing around, but City Electric is finally looking at the Key West Steam Plant building on Grinnell Street as a possible site for affordable housing.
This sudden burst of sanity on the part of the Utility Board (City Electric's governing body) follows the collapse of the ill-conceived Washington Square Partners proposal— which would have converted the plant into 26 luxury apartments, six cinemas, a food court with "family-style" restaurants and various retail stores(think mall). The scale and composition of the development would have been completely inappropriate for the Key West Bight district, worsening the already unmanageable traffic on the area's narrow streets. It would also have created hundreds of new jobs requiring hundreds of new employees, further exacerbating our critical affordable housing shortage.
Now we have a chance to do it right. The Steam Plant has great possibilities, a structurally solid building with an enormous interior—five stories of 30,000 square feet apiece— and an attractive art deco-looking facade that would be astronomically expensive to reproduce today.
The developer of the successful affordable housing development Mariners Cove is asking the Utility Board for an exclusive contract that would include the construction of between 120 and 130 one-, two-, and three-bedroom affordable rental units on the top four floors.
An artists colony is exploring the possibility of getting the ground floor as studio space for local and visiting artists. And if the artists colony concept doesn't work out, the ground floor would an ideal multi-purpose space to serve as a civic center and desperately needed City office space.
The space could also include a day care center for the use of residents and the public. Another possibility would be to utilize one floor as a multi-purpose space that could double as a force-five hurricane shelter. In each of these scenarios, the site would directly or indirectly provide something for everyone in the community.
But even if City Electric signs off on the deal, the plan faces several big obstacles. The first will be getting the state to issue the Rate of Growth Ordinance (ROGO) units needed to build the housing. The City's past record of squandering these residential units and allowing them to be turned into unlicensed transient rentals makes the state view new ROGO requests with skepticism.
We must also make sure that the units remain affordable in perpetuity, or they will be of no benefit to this community in the long run.
Given these conditions, the Steam Plant proposal is a great idea, one in which the taxpayers wouldn't have to bear the total financial responsibility for providing affordable housing, as is the case with the City's still-unbuilt Roosevelt Annex project.
But the plan would provide just a small part of the solution to our affordable housing crisis. The City and the business community must also actively get behind the implementation and enforcement of the city's transient rental ordinance, which would free up an estimated 1,000 units for long-term rentals and sales.
The business community, which would benefit directly from a more stable workforce, must also take responsibility for contributing fairly to the costs of providing affordable housing and for paying their employees a living wage so they can afford decent housing.
The Utility Board has an opportunity to take real leadership in the crusade to increase affordable housing stocks. They would provide a good example to City officials, who despite their constant public statements in support of affordable housing, have been dragging their heels and making no headway in alleviating our serious housing crisis.