Why do city officials seem perpetually baffled by Key West's worsening affordable housing shortage? This long-standing problem is mostly due to the actions— or inaction— of our elected officials.
Throughout the 1980s, the Key West City Commission handed out variances like beads at a parade, allowing multi-family homes containing the apartments of working Key Westers to be turned into guest houses. The loss of these apartments and rooms from our housing pool has contributed considerably to our perennial affordable housing problems. For 30, years elected officials refused to see any correlation between giving these variances and the resulting losses to our community— residents gone and neighborhoods destroyed. These self-evident threats to our sustainability have been pointed out to commissioners and city staff many times over the years by concerned citizens, to no avail.
Even when Key West's allocation of transient licenses under the Rate of Growth Ordinance (ROGO) were gone, multi-family homes continued to be turned into guest houses, some by subterfuge and others by rewriting the past— finding "lost" documents that justified these conversions. In one case, a local attorney "discovered" hotel licenses given in error 20 years previously, but never legally rescinded. So another guest house was born, taking two conch houses and putting the thirteen working people who lived in them out of their homes and out of the neighborhood.
Some guest house owners may actually have started out with good intentions when they assimilated adjacent single and multi-family homes into their commercial operations as employee housing. But the next thing you know, not only are no guest house employees living in the adjacent houses, but the owners themselves have moved out so they can illegally rent more rooms. Meanwhile, even though a plethora of commercial spaces are available in Key West, business people who should know better are getting licenses for "home offices" in single family homes where no one actually lives— draining away numerous housing units by turning them into office space.
While our elected officials are"struggling" with the affordable housing issue, well-connected developers are getting a green light to do as they please. Right now, a former city attorney is steamrolling plans through the City's permitting system to build six new buildings on Whitehead Street next to the Hilton Hotel, transferring transient licenses of dubious origin to legitimize the units, and commandeering a public park as the project's entrance. Meanwhile, it has taken years to get even the first symbolic shovels of dirt tossed at the Roosevelt Annex affordable housing site and nothing has happened there since.
While new affordable housing units like those slated to be built (someday) at the Roosevelt Annex site will provide some relief to our housing shortage, new construction is not the answer— especially since our past experience shows that there is no guarantee that these new units won't themselves be hijacked for transient or commercial use.
Instead, we must fight to eliminate the illegal transient rentals and commercial uses that siphon off critical long-term housing and degrade the quality of life in our neighborhoods.