Leveraging Public Land and Infrastructure for the Development of Innovative Housing

This panel will explore the role that government, as land owner, can play in the development of affordable and other community-focused housing. The discussion will include models where the government provides land at no or low cost for the development of affordable housing to mitigate financing gaps, and also much more complex partnership arrangements that leverage existing public infrastructure (such as parking or mass transit facilities) and meet multiple public-policy objectives. An illustrative example will be the Miami-Dade County Palmetto Station project, which involves the redevelopment of a surface parking lot at a mass-transit station to include 1,000 affordable housing units with a mix of income levels, including units set aside for young adults aging out of foster care, and new parking facilities to be shared with the adjacent station, which reduces parking needs for the residential development.