Adults with intellectual disabilities are getting local affordable housing, a first-of-its-kind community in Miami-Dade County.
The new $42 million community will be developed on a nine-acre site at 11025 SW 84th St. in Kendall thanks to nonprofit Casa Familia and the county.
The abandoned county site — dotted with an aging basketball court, playground and boarded up single-story houses — will become The Village of Casa Familia. The village will have housing with capped rents and an 11,000-square-foot community center.
The community will come in three phases. The first includes the construction of a three-story building with 50 apartment rentals. The initial phase also will have a community center with a gym, and game room, movie theater, pool and spa.
The second and third phases will add four six-bedroom houses and another building with 60 more apartment rentals.
“Everyone needs housing — it is a basic human right — and populations with special needs all the more so, because they can’t just live anywhere,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
“These are young people, young adults who have the capacity to live with supportive services,” she said. “It is groundbreaking. It is compassionate. It sets an example for the state, the country, the world and also alleviates the housing crisis.”
The project will be one of only six of its kind in Florida, and a first for Miami-Dade and the tri-county area. It has been eight years in the making, and got off the ground with funding from a variety of partners, including private donors, Miami-Dade, the state, and the Florida Housing Finance Corp.
The first phase includes one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. Normally, affordable housing rents are capped at 80% of the county’s area median income — $74,700, according to criteria set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Renters here will pay even lower than that, dedicating at max 30% of their income to their residence.
Construction begins on the first phase in January. The Village of Casa Familia is anticipated to open in the first half of 2026. Miami-Dade will handle and review applications four months before the first phase is completed.
Miami-based Atlantic Pacific Companies will build the project. Once the project is completed, United Community Options of South Florida will step into provide services and support to residents and RAM Partners will manage the site.
Renters will benefit from living in the Kendall community, said Anay Abraham, executive director of Casa Familia. The community is within a three-minute drive to The Palms at Town & Country, four minutes to Kendall Indian Hammocks Park and 10 minutes of Baptist Health South Florida.
“Kendall is such a great opportunity, because you have 9 acres embedded near job resources,” Abraham said. “You have a real community around them. It is a phenomenal area for them.”
Miami-Dade has long been in a housing crisis. The mayor declared a state of emergency due to the short supply of housing during the pandemic, and has committed through funding and new initiatives to boost the county’s affordable and workforce housing supply. Research shows it’s desperately needed because renters are often cost-burdened in Miami-Dade County.
Reprinted from The Miami Herald.
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