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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