City surplus land inventory played key role in this affordable-housing solution.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: April 30, 2025
Host: It will barely make a dent in Sarasota’s affordable housing crisis, even in the list of veterans still waiting for housing. But more projects like this could make a difference. On Wednesday morning, a veterans’ housing complex offering 10 affordable apartments officially opened in Newtown—the first of its kind in Sarasota County. Johannes Werner talked to Jon Thaxton, the man who prodded the Heroes’ Village through all its stages.
[Music]
Singer: For the land of the free and the home of the brave.
[Crowd applauds, cheers]
Johannes Werner: That was the sound of a bit of relief from the affordable housing crisis in Sarasota on a hot late-April morning. The occasion was a ribbon cutting for Heroes’ Village, a two-story rental complex that will be managed by a subsidiary of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the international Catholic charity. The complex is designed to house veterans and their families in 10 two-bedroom apartments that can be split between roommates or be used by families, and the rents are expected to be affordable for veterans who make 80 percent of the area median household income. That’s roughly $51,000.
Jon Thaxton, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the philanthropic Gulf Coast Community Foundation, said the main factor that made this particular project viable was free land.
Jon Thaxton
Jon Thaxton: One of the major difficulties in constructing affordable housing in Sarasota County—you’ve got construction costs, you’ve got labor costs, you’ve got all these costs—and land costs—that you don’t control. But if you own the land, you control the land cost, and that is a highly leverageable asset to use in affordable housing.
JW: The City of Sarasota gifted a half-acre property for this particular project. Thaxton became aware of the opportunity from viewing the city’s land inventory.
JT: Not only is it a very valuable asset to have a printed, searchable, easily accessible inventory of surplus government land to use to leverage affordable housing like we did, it’s the state law. The state law requires cities and counties to do this. The city property on which Heroes’ Village was built was land that the city commission correctly identified as surplus, so it was relatively easy to find. I just gave a call to Cindy Emshoff, who I worked with quite a bit at OHCD, and said, “Cindy, this is what I’m looking for. I want to do this number of units. I want it already zoned; I don’t want to have to go through a rezoning. I don’t want to have to get a special exception. I’m not going to be looking for height or setback variances. I’m going to build it exactly as it’s designated and vested in the zoning code. These lots came up.
JW: Thaxton adds that cities, the school board and the public hospital board still need some prodding to improve the quality of their surplus land listings.
There was some pushback from the Newtown community in Sarasota. One argument by community leaders in Newtown was that the site of Heroes’ Village is in the commercial heart of Newtown—one block south of Martin Luther King Way near Orange Avenue, next to the Leonard Reid House and a planned African American Cultural Center. That land should have more intense uses that spur economic activity. Another argument was that Newtown already is a major focus of public-housing expansion and other low-income housing. Thaxton rejects that argument, saying Heroes’ Village was just one of five affordable housing projects he is pursuing all over the county.
JT: I was working on three affordable housing projects at the same time—actually, five—at the same time as I was doing Heroes Village, and only one of the five was in North Sarasota. There was one in Osprey, there was one in Nokomis, and there were two in—one in—Osprey, Laurel, Nokomis, Venice, and two in North Port.
If they look at what’s going on in the rest of the county, you will see that we are putting affordable housing everywhere. I just prepared a list of $120 million worth of affordable housing projects from affordable housing developers—private sector, public sector, not for profit, for profit—and submitted it to the County Commission. 10 percent, 15 percent was maybe in Newtown. All the rest is everyone else.
JW: He says the location is ideal because it is close to transit, jobs, schools and houses of worship. Who will be moving in? Thaxton says that, because the apartment sizes are small, he expects single people moving in with roommates rather than families with children. He also expects the tenants to be people who already live in the area.
JT: We are going to be targeting, though, veterans. Veterans who served this country in one capacity or the other. Veterans that, for whatever reason, are having difficulty finding sustainable housing. They’re in a housing crisis. This is a property that is dedicated to them.
JW: The process wasn’t an easy one. But he will have to produce more of these kinds of small projects, Thaxton says.
JT: We’re over time and over budget. Fortunately, we have the most amazing, altruistically minded donors, and they understood the issues that we were facing with supply chain and all of that—labor costs—and we asked them for money, and they gave; we came back, we asked them for more money, and they gave us more money; and we came back for a third time, and they either gave us more money or found us people that would give us more money. So it’s going to be a day of celebration, but after the celebration is done—say, 4:00 in the afternoon the same day—we need to start looking at doing it again.
JW: Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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