Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse
Strategy-of-the-Month Club
 
October 2007
 
Over the past several years, skyrocketing housing prices
have moved homeownership opportunities beyond the reach
of many working American families. Communities that
actively promote affordable housing often come up
against a number of challenges, including "Not in My
Backyard" (NIMBY) concerns, excessive development fees,
and zoning code regulations, just to name a few.
 
To lessen the effects of these barriers in and around
the Orlando area, the Orange County Government in
Central Florida designed a Workforce Housing Toolkit to
help local jurisdictions in their search for affordable
housing solutions. Because there's no "one-size-fits-
all" solution to housing barriers, this toolkit includes
a variety of approaches, such as mixed-income
development, density bonuses, and infill development.
 
For example, a community that once relied on an
industrial economy may house several vacant or blighted
industrial buildings. Orange County's Workforce Housing
Toolkit provides information on adaptive reuse programs,
and describes how this approach can be used to turn an
obsolete, underutilized building into one with a more
productive purpose by creating new housing
opportunities. Additionally, the toolkit contains
resources on communities that have successfully
instituted an adaptive reuse program.
 
The toolkit consists of a variety of regulatory reform
strategies that can be located by searching
alphabetically or by using the following subcategories:
 
o Housing Development;
 
o Housing Preservation;
 
o Density and Design;
 
o Financial Tools and Resources;
 
o Owner Housing;
 
o Rental Housing; and
 
o Special Needs Populations
 
To view the resources in this toolkit, please visit
 https://www.huduser.gov/rbc/search/rbcdetails.asp?DocId=1514.
 
We hope this information proves useful to you in your
efforts to grow your region's affordable housing stock.
If you have regulatory reform strategies or resources
that you'd like to share, send us an email
at rbcsubmit@huduser.gov, call us at 1-800-245-2691
(option 4), or visit our website at www.regbarriers.org.
 
Feel free to forward this message to anyone who is
working to bring down the regulatory barriers to
affordable housing.
 
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