How Miami is tackling the crisis in affordable housing — one building at a time

WLRN Public Media | By Joshua Ceballos

Leonardo Starke (center) with his family and members of the 3C initiative team outside the Palm Plaza apartments in Overtown, Miami.

The Palm Plaza apartment building in Miami has been in the Starke family for nearly 50 years. Evans H. Starke bought it in 1977 for $13,000 and, with the help of his children, turned it into an affordable place for Overtown residents to live for generations.

Leonardo Starke kept the property after his father died in 2020, but the need for major renovations made him consider if his family could afford to keep Palm Plaza going — in a time when Miami’s need for affordable housing is at an all-time high. Miami is one of the nation's least affordable cities and is the epicenter of the housing crisis.

“As long as that building has been in the family it has been an affordable housing building,” Starke said at a groundbreaking event for Palm Plaza's renovation this Wednesday. “We reached a crossroads with this property where we needed major, major renovations that could cost seven figures. It became an issue of ‘what can we do?’”

With the help of a national housing initiative, however, Palm Plaza is on its way to a full renovation with the commitment that its existing 18 units will remain affordable — with monthly rents around $900 — into the future. The median rent for a one-bedroom unit in Miami is $2,600, according to the latest data.

Connecting Capital and Communities

The Palm Plaza property in Overtown has been in the Starke family for nearly 50 years, and has offered affordable rents to area residents.

Palm Plaza is the first project in the pipeline of a broad affordable housing initiative called “Connecting Capital and Community” or “3C.” Miami is one of five cities participating in the initiative that was chosen for both its housing needs and the racial inequity in development.

Miami Homes For All, a housing advocacy nonprofit, is spearheading the 3C initiative in Miami. Annie Lord, the nonprofit’s executive director, said the purpose of 3C is to identify and meet the needs of people who want to build or preserve affordable housing on existing properties.

“We found many property owners and smaller developers that were willing to build affordable housing on the property they already owned but maybe they didn’t have the resources or the expertise to do it by themselves,” Lord told WLRN.

3C works with small-time property owners and developers who have land or existing multifamily buildings to find public funding and grants as well as assistance with navigating permitting and zoning hurdles.

In the case of Palm Plaza, 3C connected the Starke family with the City of Miami’s Omni Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). It provided the family with a $900,000 grant toward the renovation, and helped find the building’s existing tenants a place to live while the construction is underway.

“They’ve given us every kind of help you can imagine. They really have been ‘Johnny on the Spot’ — they’re helpful and timely,” Leonardo Starke said.

Not Delusional

There are 15 properties in the 3C pipeline in Miami, including Palm Plaza and a new duplex to be constructed elsewhere in Overtown. The projects include rehabilitation of existing housing stock, as well as new construction, in five majority-minority neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County: Overtown, Allapattah, Brownsville, Liberty City, Little Haiti and North Miami.

In total the initiative seeks to build or preserve 150 units at rents affordable by low-income families.

Miami Homes For All released a report early this year that found Miami-Dade County is short 90,181 units for households earning $75,000 or less. Lord, the executive director, said she has no illusions about 3C’s current work making a significant dent to that deficit.

“We're not delusional. You could say 150 units is just a drop in the bucket. But these are 150 that would never have seen the light of day without this support,” Lord told WLRN.

Because large-scale affordable housing developments with 100 or more units are harder to fund and get permitting for, Lord hopes to create a framework for more small-scale development projects to help address the housing crisis on a faster timeline.

“If our only strategy is large-scale multi-family — it’s gonna take forever and we may never get there,” Lord said. “Meanwhile, we have a ton of small-scale land that is either vacant or underutilized and is in the hands of people willing to put affordable housing on it.”

3C is already in the planning stages for the next pipeline of affordable housing projects to tackle. In 2025, it will begin identifying new property owners looking to build small-scale affordable housing.