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Affordable housing plan faces hurdle

A plan to build 50 rental units in Crystal River must first get county confirmation that a nearby road can handle increased traffic the project will generate.

By CATHERINE E. SHOICHET
Published March 21, 2006

Florida Low Income Housing Associates wants to build a rental duplex project in Crystal River to help meet the county's increasing demand for affordable housing.

But the nonprofit developer has run into a roadblock, literally.

The project is planned for 31 acres off Turkey Oak Drive, and to permit the project, the county needs to confirm that the road has capacity to handle the traffic the 50-unit development would generate.

In preliminary meetings this month, county staffers said they can't do that, and Florida Low Income Housing Associates is asking the County Commission for help.

Staffers say the project fails to meet traffic requirements, not because of its size, but because thousands of trips on the road are already reserved for the Betz Farm development, a project that was approved in 1987 but never built, director of Development Services Gary Maidhof said.

The state approved Betz Farm as a Development of Regional Impact in 1987. The plan called for 1,500 homes, Maidhof said, and allowed for 786 peak-hour trips and 8,019 average daily trips on Turkey Oak Drive. But the project was never begun.

The county now owns 325 acres of the Betz Farm property, Maidhof said, and it's up to the County Commission to decide what to do.

Maidhof said he will ask commissioners to consider assigning trips designated for Betz Farm to the duplex project at the next County Commission meeting March 28.

Florida Low Income Housing Associates development director Dan Wilson said the company has already secured $4.2-million in loans from the Florida Housing Finance Corp. and $1.7-million from a Tampa lending consortium for the project, in addition to $150,000 in grants administered by Citrus County.

The project, dubbed Nature Walk, will include 25 duplexes and a community center, Wilson said. Rents will range from $470 to $576 per month, Wilson said. It would generate 26 peak-hour trips and 213 average daily trips on Turkey Oak Drive.

Nature Walk would be the developer's third rental project in the county, Wilson said. Since 1989, it has developed more than 600 single-family units and 220 rental units in Citrus, Marion and Sumter counties.

In the past two years, Wilson said "a large section of the population has been eliminated from the ability to purchase a new home" because of escalating costs of land, material and labor.

That means demand for affordable rentals has increased dramatically, he said.

The County Commission has not yet decided what to build on the Betz Farm property. At a February goal-setting meeting, Commissioner Dennis Damato suggested it as a site for affordable housing.

--Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at cshoichet@sptimes.com or 860-7309.

[Last modified March 21, 2006, 02:30:40]