The search for places to build affordable housing is moving to the wide open spaces of Collier County.

So far, though, proposals to rewrite a landmark growth plan to require or even encourage affordable housing among the farm fields and citrus groves east of Golden Gate Estates have gone nowhere.

The 2002 plan, the result of a slow-growth order from Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet, has been held up as a model for balancing rural growth, environmental protection and agriculture in Florida.

Large developments, called Developments of Regional Impact, or DRIs, in the county’s so-called Rural Land Stewardship Area already must meet affordable housing rules imposed by the state, but some say the county should do more to address one of its most pressing needs.

The rural land area is the county’s last best chance to solve its affordable housing crisis, said Ross McIntosh, a land broker and real estate market watcher.

“It’s unlikely we can solve it in the urban area just because there’s so little land left,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re hardly going to make a dent.”

In May, defying county planners and siding with representatives of large rural landowners, county commissioners quashed the idea of requiring affordable housing in the rural land area.

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The Lennar Corp., which is planning a new town called Serenoa on 4,500 acres north of Ave Maria, left, said the town will have some affordable housing component.

Commissioners have yet to weigh in on another proposal that would chip away at a central tenet of the landmark growth plan by allowing developers to build affordable housing without having to use environmental stewardship credits.

The rural land area covers almost 200,000 acres around Immokalee. The plan divides the area into land to be preserved and land where growth is allowed.

The county’s largest landowners, calling themselves the Eastern Collier Property Owners, hired engineering and planning firm WilsonMiller to create the plan with oversight from a county-appointed citizens committee.

They included Barron Collier Partnership, Pacific Land Co., Alico Inc., Collier Enterprises, landowner Jack Price and Consolidated Citrus. At the time, the companies owned 168,000 acres in the Rural Land Stewardship Area.

The plan creates an elaborate point system that awards credits to landowners for setting aside land for protection, restoring land or keeping it in agricultural production. Developers use the credits to build new towns.

The plan is voluntary, but landowners are using it. Ave Maria University and its companion town are being built under the plan. Landowners have so far created 52,200 credits. Ave Maria is using 33,100 of them.

A credit doesn’t equal a housing unit. The number of housing units that credits are worth depends on a complex formula.

McIntosh calls the plan’s vision of villages and towns interspersed with farmland a “dreamland” that will kill affordable housing.

The conventional wisdom is that there won’t be enough credits to build on all the land open to development under the 2002 plan.

That sets up a choice for Collier County: Should land left undeveloped as part of the 2002 plan be left that way, or be used to meet a community need for affordable housing, McIntosh asks.

“I’m not suggesting we give up environmental protection; I’m suggesting we give up open space,” McIntosh said.

Allowing developers to build affordable housing without getting stewardship credits angers environmental advocates and worries landowners who want to sell their credits.

Florida Wildlife Federation field representative Nancy Payton said the 2002 plan was designed purposely to retain open space - which is colored pink on maps depicting the plan.

“Just because an area is pink doesn’t mean there has to be a house on it,” she said. “That open land has a lot of value.”

The land provides a place for rain to recharge underground drinking water aquifers, provides food, keeps farming a viable industry in Collier County and is an important part of a mosaic of habitats required by wildlife, Payton said.

Besides that, giving affordable housing developers a pass on stewardship credits would upset the economics on which landowners who have credits are depending to make a buck.

“If we start giving other landowners (in receiving areas) a free ride, we (landowners in sending areas) are going to feel like we got hoodwinked,” said Tom Taylor, a member of a partnership selling stewardship credits from the Lake Trafford Ranch.

Taylor said he might be willing to support the idea of waiving stewardship credits for affordable housing - as long as the affordable housing is part of a larger project that uses credits.

One of the largest landowners in the rural area is intrigued by the idea of building affordable housing without having to get stewardship credits.

“I think you’d probably see landowners want to do that,” said Charlie Lucas, president and CEO of Consolidated Citrus LP, which owns some 14,000 acres in three groves in eastern Collier County.

“It would get our attention,” he said. “We’d be interested in pursuing it to see if it’s feasible.”

County commissioners, though, haven’t weighed in on the question of giving affordable housing a pass on the stewardship credit requirement.

“That’s always been a concept but the prevailing thought has always been get that program started before monkeying with it,” said Cormac Giblin, the county’s housing and grants manager.

In May, commissioners used the same rationale to justify balking at a proposal that would have required affordable housing in the rural area.

Commissioners sided against a recommendation from their planners and instead agreed with a representative of WilsonMiller, the consultant for large landowners who created the stewardship plan that commissioners adopted in 2002.

“The (Rural Land Stewardship Area) is the area that’s going to experience the most future growth,” said David Weeks, the county’s comprehensive planning manager, who urged commissioners to adopt an affordable housing mandate. “That’s a gaping hole not to have some future mandate for affordable housing out there.”

An inclusionary zoning ordinance, which would require developers to build affordable housing in their projects or pay a fee, is on its way to county commissioners this fall. It would apply countywide, including in the rural land area, Giblin said.

WilsonMiller planner Margaret Perry urged the commissioners to wait for a 2008 review of the plan before making any changes to it.

In arguing her case to commissioners, Perry pointed to Ave Maria, the university and town being developed by Barron Collier Cos. and Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan on more than 4,000 acres south of Immokalee.

Ave Maria agreed to build 200 very-low income units, 700 low-income units and 1,000 moderate income units - or about 17.5 percent of Ave Maria’s total units, Perry said.

In addition, Ave Maria designated a 28-acre off-site location where Habitat for Humanity can build up to 150 units, she said.

Ave Maria triggered affordable housing rules because of its status as a DRI, but the rules aren’t hard-and-fast requirements.

“It’s really a negotiated kind of process,” said Collier Enterprises vice president Margaret Emblidge, a member of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council that reviews Developments of Regional Impact.

The planning council has a policy that DRIs should set aside 5 percent of their land for affordable housing. Developers can meet the requirement by building housing on their site or contributing money to a local government, planning council Executive Director David Burr said.

Other developers also are pledging to provide affordable housing in the rural land area without being required by county rules.

Darin MacMurray, a regional vice president for Lennar Corp. that’s planning a new town called Serenoa on 4,500 acres north of Ave Maria, said Serenoa will have some affordable housing component because the company wants to be a responsible builder.

Collier Enterprises, which is laying plans to develop land on the western edge of the Rural Land Stewardship Area, is making affordable housing a “high priority,” Emblidge said.

She said the rural land area was designed to include self-contained towns that by definition must have affordable housing to be self-sustaining.

Emblidge said Collier Enterprises will not ask for any break from the stewardship credit requirement in exchange for the affordable housing.

A big question is how the stewardship credit system will change the economics of developing affordable housing in the rural land area.

Taylor, at Lake Trafford Ranch, said the process of creating the credits and undertaking the restoration required to earn some of the credits costs millions of dollars, but he wouldn’t be more specific about the cost of the ranch’s credits. So far, he has no buyers.

Another holder of credits, the Half Circle L Ranch, is under contract to sell them to a partnership that includes Taylor, but the deal, once set to close in August, has been put off until February, said Rocky Scofield, co-owner of Half Circle L Ranch. Neither Scofield nor Taylor would disclose the value of the deal.

Barron Collier, one half of the Ave Maria partnership, is the largest owner of stewardship credits in the rural land area. The company created the credits and transferred them to the Ave Maria project.

MacMurray, the Lennar executive, said building affordable housing in the Rural Land Stewardship Area will be more difficult under the stewardship credit system.

“Credits are not cheap so it will impact housing prices,” MacMurray said.

Collier Building Industry Association Executive Vice President Brenda Talbert called the stewardship credit system a “regulatory barrier” to affordable housing.

CBIA is in favor of Collier County government tearing down such barriers, she said.

“They hold the magic wand,” Talbert said.

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Staff writer Gina Edwards contributed to this report.

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