Association of Florida Community Developers

quarterly meetings. In August, we had our largest in-person in two years, in Tampa, and we’re excited to be back together – of course, being social distanced and adhering to health protocols, so people feel comfortable coming to a meeting with a group of 50 or more attendees from around the state.” “Everything we do is two-way communication; we’re a very grassroots organization. All of our members have a voice. We have annual task forces that we form that deal with our legislative agenda – both developer members and associate members sit on those task forces, and every year out of those task forces we create AFCD’s legislative agenda, which is communicated directly to our lobby team, and then they go to the capital to advocate for us.” BVM: How has COVID impacted the housing demand and supply of materials? Pierce: “In Florida, the presence of community developers continues to grow, however, a lot of our companies are nationally or internationally based. So we have companies with their headquarters here or other states that do projects all over the world. We have 1,000 people moving to this state every single day, over 350,000 new residents every year in Florida. We thought that would slow down when COVID hit, but our developers and our homebuilders have not seen that demand slow at all. People continue to move here, to want to live in Florida, and our current supply is not able to meet the demand. So as long as that trend continues, I think we’ll continue to see developers have