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Salim and Kamil Chraibi have achieved great success in South Florida by building workforce housing — that is, somewhere between “affordable” and “luxury.”
Policy people call this the “missing middle” of the market. So much development is either high-end or income-restricted that the in-between homes are essentially missing.
The Chraibi brothers, as The Real Deal’s Lidia Dinkova detailed in an interesting profile, realized that if you build what’s missing, it sells. Their buyers are Americans who make too much money to qualify for affordable housing but too little to get a mortgage for a luxury home.
Buyers might also just not be inclined to buy more house than they need. These are my kind of people — practical, not extravagant, and focused on financial security rather than on keeping up with the Joneses.
To them, an oversized house means having rooms that you never use but still need to clean, heat and cool. An oversized lawn just means more mowing and higher property taxes.
I recently visited relatives in Seattle — empty nesters — who had closed off half of their house rather than heat it. I also visited relatives in Los Angeles whose formal living room is sealed off like a crime scene, and filled to the brim with stuff that they will never use again.
The Chraibis’ homes don’t have redundant spaces like a living room and a family room on the same floor. But they sell faster than houses that do.
The profit margin on each home is lower, but the brothers make up for that with volume and quick sales. Their challenge is that south Miami-Dade, like much of America, is typically zoned for single-family homes on large lots. That inflates the cost of each lot and makes a starter home unprofitable to build.
To overcome this, the brothers ask localities to rezone their sites to allow more dwellings and more types of housing. For one development, instead of 30 so-called McMansions they are building 57 townhomes.
The risk is that the locality will cave to pressure from NIMBY neighbors and not rezone.
“You build townhomes [nearby and] they are mad,” Salim Chraibi told TRD. “People think of workforce housing as, ‘Oh, these people are going to come and they are going to destroy my neighborhood.’ No, these are teachers, teaching your kids at school, these are people who show up at your door when you call 911.”
Plenty of home shoppers are interested in this kind of housing in New York City, which loses a lot of these folks to the suburbs. Homes for them don’t get built because it’s more profitable to build luxury housing in rich neighborhoods, affordable housing in poor ones, and 421a/485x housing everywhere else.
The market-rate units in 421a and 485x developments must have high enough rents to subsidize the affordable units required by these tax abatement programs. The result is a barbell-style rent structure — high-priced units, low-priced units and nothing in between.
The “missing middle” is inherent in the politics-driven design of 485x, even more so than it was with predecessor 421a. Progressives required lower-rent units and construction unions demanded higher wages.
The gap between each end of the barbell can get even wider if rezoning is involved because it triggers Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and the local City Council member often demands even cheaper rents for the affordable units.
One exception was 970 Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn, which Bruce Eichner got the City Council to rezone after a seven-year struggle. The key was unions’ testimony that for the project to get financing (from their pension funds), the lower-rent units had to be workforce housing rather than deeply affordable.
South Miami-Dade is very different from New York City, but both markets have a missing middle — and developers like the Chraibi brothers willing to fill it. New York state and city lawmakers must figure out why 485x, Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and current zoning are making that all but impossible.
Read more
Residential
South Florida
How the Chraibi brothers supercharged their south Miami-Dade workforce housing development
OC billionaire shovels $100M into building workforce housing in OC
Residential
San Francisco
SF’s Aaron Peskin pitches financing bill for “missing middle” housing
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Erik Engquist
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