Amid Affordable Housing Crisis, Broward and Palm Beach Builders Team Up to Target Controversial Fees

The Gold Coast Builders Association and Builders Association of South Florida have joined forces to launch a campaign against excessive regulatory fee increases targeting new homes.

Homes For All Now will petition elected officials to consider how the fees can make current housing crises in Broward and Palm Beach counties worse, according to Gold Coast Builders Association’s executive officer KT Catlin, who said 25% of buyers can’t afford a new home. 

“We are not an area on the affordability scale. I’ve always been taught that one and a half times your income is what you can afford in a home. In general, if I were making $100,000 a year, realistically I could afford $150,000. That is well below the average price point in either one of those counties, and well below the national average,” Catlin said.

With a tight supply chain, the pandemic and rising construction costs, fees can add more than $90,000 to the price of a newly built home. 

“No one is debating the need for them, but how do we bring them into line and keep them reasonable so that they no longer represent 25% of the cost of a home? That’s the premise behind all of this. Ultimately, having housing more affordable,” Catlin said.

Homes For All Now seeks to avoid a situation similar to what happened with the Broward School District in 2020. The district suggested raising impact fees from $6,888 to $9,049 for three-bedroom properties and $6,888 to $12,295 for four-bedroom properties. The fees are used to build new schools to meet the demand for a growing school-aged population as families move into new developments.

Both the Gold Coast Builders Association and The Builders Association of South Florida argued that there was a steady decline in enrollment expected to continue until 2026, which would make raising the impact fees unnecessarily, but the district raised impact fees by 25%.

“Our hope is to take something like that, have the conversation and have whatever changes need to be made, whether it’s an increase or possibly even a decrease, be reasonable. That’s all we want. We’re not saying, ‘we don’t want one,’ ” Catlin said. “Agree with it or not agree with it, the statute says it can only be used for certain things. We want to look at where they increase these fees and see if there’s a need or not, and if there is a need, what kind of a need is it in the real world?”

‘Builders aren’t all millionaires’

Impact fees are a controversial topic, so the campaign is prepared for pushback.

“The biggest hurdle I have seen is the general public really doesn’t understand how big the portion of the fees are that go into these homes and that they think the builders are all millionaires and can afford everything. The reality is the builders aren’t all millionaires and the fees aren’t going where they think they’re going half the time, and ultimately, the buyer pays for the fees because they’re a cost of doing business,” Catlin said.

The good news, Catlin’s view, is that commissioners listen. But for builders, there isn’t much they can do once the impact fee is there.

“All we can do is get out there in front of it, talk to people as they’re reviewing the fee structures, work with them to keep them reasonable, and then keep the public educated so they don’t think we’re walking away with all the profits,” Catlin said.

To help lower impact fees, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that prevents local governments from increasing impact fees more than once every four years. The limit is 50%, and increases between 25% and 50% have to be spread over four years. Smaller increases can be phased in over two years. Local governments will review their regulatory fees in the coming months. 

“Everybody gets hurt,” Catlin said. “The renter gets hurt, the new families wanting to move down here gets hurt. The resale market, it’s all intertwined.”