Delray Beach CRA Awards Three Vacant Lots to Community Land Trust

The Delray Beach Community Redevelopment Agency board is set to vote August 27 on awarding three city-owned vacant lots on SW 4th Street to the Delray Beach Community Land Trust for permanently affordable single-family housing. A companion item on the same agenda extends the construction deadline on a fourth CRA lot already committed to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Palm Beach County.

Why it matters

Both items sit on CRA Sub-Area 8 land the agency has held for infill housing, and both move that land toward permanently deed-restricted ownership rather than the open market. Delray Beach Community Land Trust was the only entity that responded to the CRA’s RFP for the SW 4th Street lots, and its winning bid priced the land at $5,000 a lot, far under market value, in exchange for building and permanently restricting three single-family homes. For a builder scanning CRA land banks in Palm Beach County for infill sites, that is the competition: not a developer bidding up price, but a nonprofit land trust with an inside track on land the CRA was never going to sell at market rate in the first place. It is one more data point for South Florida developers tracking how much CRA-controlled land is actually available for market-rate product versus how much has already been earmarked for workforce housing programs.

The numbers

The land trust’s proposal, the only one submitted, scored 259 of a possible 300 points from the CRA’s evaluation committee. It is asking the CRA for $236,027 to $240,334 per lot in funding assistance covering construction costs, site development, and bonding, plus buyer subsidies, and it plans to sell the completed homes for $281,248 to $299,217 apiece. Separately, Resolution 2026-10 extends Habitat for Humanity of Greater Palm Beach County’s completion deadline for one affordable home at 260 NW 9th Avenue by 545 days, from September 27, 2026 to March 28, 2028, after the city required a 2-foot alley dedication and a 25-foot corner-lot clip that forced Habitat to redesign the house.

What’s next

CRA staff will move to contract negotiations with the land trust if the board approves the award, with terms on funding assistance still to be finalized. The Habitat extension, if approved, keeps that lot in the pipeline through 2028 rather than reverting to the CRA. Together the items show Palm Beach County CRAs continuing to work through their remaining vacant-lot inventories as workforce housing rather than disposing of them for market-rate development, a pattern developers should expect to see repeat as more of these small-lot RFPs come up for award.