How HUD Can Help the Republican Party’s New Working-Class Minority Voters
Miami-Dade, the Epicenter of the Republican Minority Shift, Shows the Problem and Solution
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
Republicans should endeavor to change the definitions of workforce and affordable housing. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, the first and last conservative before President Trump who came to Washington, D.C. with the serious intention of reforming it, famously called his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) “Mr. Mayor.” As Reagan knew, HUD is something a believer in small government would rather forget. A creation of Lyndon Johnson during the inflationary Great Society years, HUD can’t be dismantled because the effect on poor seniors would be too great—even as its inefficiencies are legion and its reputation as the rat-hole of public policy in D.C. is well earned.
But elections have consequences, and the election of 2024 has delivered to Republicans an incentive for reforming HUD: a new working-class minority base that HUD is supposed to benefit, but doesn’t. Of the many boondoggles being uncovered right now in Washington, this is one that’s gone completely unnoticed while HUD engages in language games. Namely, under the HUD fictions of “affordable housing” and “workforce housing,” the black and Latino men and women who helped deliver President Trump his narrow but across-the-board victory in 2024 are being priced out of their apartments and homes—often if not always at the hands of Democratic operators who claim to be helping the dispossessed.
Nowhere are the ripple effects of HUD’s language games clearer than in South Florida's Miami-Dade County. The county is the epicenter of America’s real estate boom thanks to being a metropolitan area where law and order has held as other cities have spiraled, which makes it attractive to out-of-towners. It is also home to the highest concentrated population of President Trump’s new swing base: working- and middle-class Latinos and Blacks who voted Republican in 2024. Digging into how HUD’s definitions of affordable and workforce housing affects Miamians on the ground shows why reform is necessary—and why it will help Republicans by helping the new Republican base.
“Affordable” and “Workforce” Housing: The Definitions…
“Affordable” housing, in housing advocates’ own telling, is one of the key reasons for HUD’s existence, but its definition is open to abuse. HUD defines affordable housing “as housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.” Theoretically, this means that anyone in any income bracket could qualify, but HUD narrows the definition further, based on Area Median Family Income (AMFI):
Moderate Income – Households with incomes between 80% and 120% of AMFI
Low-income (LI) – Households with incomes between 50% and 80% of AMFI
Very low-income (VLI) - household incomes between 30% and 50% of AMFI
Extremely Low-Income (ELI) – Households 30% or below of AMFI
The term “workforce housing,” meanwhile, “is most often used to indicate a program targeted at households that earn too much to qualify for traditional affordable housing subsidies.” In HUD’s definition, “workforce housing is most commonly intended for households with incomes between 80 and 120% of AMI [Area Median Income].” Area Median Income (AMI), in turn, is defined by HUD “as the midpoint of a specific area’s income distribution.” Consistent numbers about affordable housing cutoffs, and consistent definitions of what those numbers mean, are, interestingly, hard to come by. But AMFI (Area Median Family Income) as well as AMHI (Area Median Household Income) appear to be used in practice by HUD to mean the same thing as AMI (Area Median Income). After working through this confusion, it’s possible to draw certain conclusions about affordable housing limits and how they’re applied.
To begin with, this is an extremely large stretch of income earners to be receiving government funds. It’s even more so in Miami-Dade County, which Joe Biden’s HUD Secretary designated as the “epicenter of the housing crisis in this country.” In Miami-Dade, the area median household income which every city and neighborhood is measured by is $79,400.00—regardless of whether the AMHI in the particular area is more than $100,000.00 or less than $20,000.00 or somewhere in between.
…And their (Intentional?) Local Confusions
But this doesn’t take into account the very possibly intentional confusion at the local level. According to the Housing and Community Development Office of the County, applying data taken from HUD, Miami-Dade’s $79,400.00 area median household income means that “affordable housing,” when applied to a single individual, could apply to someone earning $23,820.00 or less—or to someone earning as much as $95,280.00, which is 120 percent of the area median income. For a family of four, the affordable housing range using these calculations is $34,050.00 or less—all the way to $136,200.00. But Miami-Dade’s formal Affordable Housing certification sheet for developers, which is not included in this webpage but has to be hunted down through online searches, defines the affordable housing range as up to 140%, an extra 20%.
“Workforce housing,” meantime, is subject to even more confusion. It is defined on Miami-Dade’s government website as between 60 and 140 AMI for a family of four. But the website then links viewers to its newest program to address affordability, Miami-Dade’s new Multifamily Rental and County Workforce Incentive Housing Program (CWHIP). The small-print data about that program makes clear that workforce housing could apply to an individual earning anywhere between 60 and 140 AMI.
Finally, on Miami-Dade’s formal Affordable Housing certification for developers, the County offers no less than five different formulas for developers to use to allocate affordable and workforce housing among different classes of income earners. This makes it nearly impossible to predict exactly what a County-approved affordable and workforce housing project will look like. It also leads to reports in respected publications like The Miami Herald quoting housing numbers that don’t appear to tally with the proposals themselves.
Is this confusion intentional? At the very least, neither Miami-Dade officials nor major developers have made any effort to make matters clearer. In this context of unclarity, the most reliable marker for assessing any new project is the formal Affordable Housing certification for developers, which defines the “targeted clientele” for Affordable and Workforce Housing as a family of 1 to 5 earning between 30 and 140 percent of AMI, meaning that an individual can earn between $23,850.00 and $111,300.00 and still qualify.
The Effects on the Ground
In the midst of these abstract confusions, the concrete harms of these definitions and formulas are jarring. One recent example of how this affordable and workforce housing fiction hurts working class Miami-Dade neighborhoods came in 2024, in Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in West Miami-Dade. There, the mid-sized developer Raul F. Rodriguez of CREI Holdings has used $4 million in HUD money to build “affordable and workforce housing” while displacing 3,000 citizens renting land from him. These citizens are people like Romelia Fernandez, who is 95, came to America from Cuba in 1969, pays the majority of her monthly social security check to rent the land, and has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years. Many of them, too, are supporters of Trump.
But they’re being priced out of their homes to make way for soon-to-be-built units of which, according to the official project description,
Approximately 40% (130 units) of the total unit count will be set aside for those earning no more than 80% Area Median Income (AMI). The remaining 60% (196 units) of the total unit count will be set aside for those earning no more than 120% AMI. ,
Li’l Abner is located in an area of Miami-Dade, Sweetwater, where the area median income is $53,159.00—but, under Rodriguez’s plan, an individual earning as much as $95,280.00 could be living there soon on a government subsidy.
So the working class who vote Republican are being displaced for higher-income earners who, judging by statistics, have more liberal politics and don’t need the government help. And what’s the long-term outlook for the old Li’l Abner neighborhood? Rodriguez’s new developments catering to wealthier residents mean rising property values. This translates into higher property tax revenues, which continues the process of turning a livable neighborhood into a haven for better-off new arrivals and a cash cow for a wealthy developer connected to Democratic powers-that-be. This, it’s worth noting, is another example of what most Democratic policies, from encouraging illegal immigration to making schools “trauma-informed” to funding foreign wars, amount to writ large. They burden taxpayers, directly or indirectly, to help the rich and well-connected, while leaving the working and increasingly the middle class behind.
More Variations on “Affordable Housing”: The Live Local Act Hurts Low-Income Communities, and Higher Ones, Too
More affordable housing problems have hit Miami-Dade residents thanks to Florida's Live Local Act, passed by the legislature last year to try to bring housing costs down in Florida. This Act took HUD’s definitions of Affordable and Workforce housing as the basis for its reforms, and it also added certain provisions, or sweeteners, that allowed developers dealing in Affordable Housing to bypass zoning laws passed by local governments. An example of the problems that resulted comes at the development Laguna Gardens, Northeast of Sweetwater, in Miami Gardens. The developer, Cymbal DLT, “originally planned” Laguna Gardens “as a market-rate complex” but then
retroactively applied the [Live Local Act], designating all units for households earning up to 120 percent of the area median income. Monthly rents start at about $2,000, according to the release. This allowed Cymbal to get a property tax exemption, one of the Live Local Act’s incentives for developers to build affordable and workforce housing.
To put this move in perspective, it’s occurring in a historically black neighborhood, Miami Gardens, where the Area median income $59,380.00, and the lowest rent, $2,000.00 a month, tallies up to 40 percent of an average Miami Gardens income—violating HUD’s core definition of Affordable Housing, “housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.” Looking at the Laguna Gardens’ apartment listings online reinforces this view. It shows that the real range for apartments is $2,184 to $3,450 per month and that renters “must have 3x the rent in total household income (before taxes).” This clocks in at an income range of $78,624 to $124,200 to live in a neighborhood where the area median income, again, is $59,380.00.
But Miami Gardens isn’t the only site of plays like these. Another is the much tonier Coral Gables, which is predominantly White and Latino, and where the area median income as of 2022 was $118,000.00. There, between Coral Way and Miracle Mile, the heart of the neighborhood, the Live Local Act allows developers to bypass local development restrictions, and residents’ objections, using the fiction of affordable housing. One developer has successfully pushed through a proposal "to build three eight-story buildings with 995 apartments and 55 rental townhouses on the eight-acre site at 3655 Southwest 22nd Street…of the apartments, 420 would be at affordable rents pursuant to Live Local Act requirements, which makes them exempt from local zoning restrictions."
So, to rewind: less than half of the apartments in this building qualify as affordable—and, in the name of “affordable housing,” a developer got to jettison zoning restrictions voted on by the 40,000 strong Coral Gables community. Members of this community, understandably, aren’t happy. "My mom has three sisters. They each have a house in Coral [Gables]," Pilar Padilla told NBC 6 South Florida. "We don’t have to worry about traffic... I raised my children here, my grandchildren and I’m really, really, really worried about the traffic." This concern makes sense, since the development would include 44,000 square feet of office and retail space, and two garages with about 2,000 parking spots. Another resident, Ralph Rosado, complained about the un-representative aspect, since, under the Live Local Act, the development not only escapes zoning restrictions but also “all public hearing requirements."
Affordable Housing that’s Anything But—and Its Variations
Obviously, “Affordable and Workforce Housing” in this definition is anything but affordable—especially for the working class minority voters who powered President Trump to victory. But more HUD-backed fictions exist as well. These include “mixed-income” housing as well as the federal tax credits that accompany affordable and workforce housing. Digging into these policies, and their effects in Miami-Dade, shows their harms, which range from displacing President Trump’s minority coalition to promoting the racial and climate policies MAGA abhors.
Photo from the HUD website, archive, provided to HUD by Miami Dade County, by Armando Raúl Rodríguez