In our continuing series on organizations making a difference in the Southeast, this month we feature Carrfour Supportive Housing and speak with Property Management Vice President Sal Russo.

As the leading nonprofit provider of supportive housing in Florida, Carrfour has provided homes and services for more than 10,000 formerly homeless men, women and children since its founding in 1993.

Enterprise: Tell us about your work at Carrfour. 
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Sal Russo headshot

Sal Russo: I oversee a department of about 50 employees spread across 28 properties consisting of around 2,000 affordable apartments in Florida. The vast majority of Carrfour’s properties are in the City of Miami, but we also have properties in Homestead, Florida City, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. 

We also have a property that we own but do not operate in Melbourne. Finally, we have a property in the pipeline located in Pembrook Pines.

In terms of staffing structure, I have three area managers who oversee the operations of nine to 10 properties in their individual portfolio. These individual portfolios are not necessarily geographically as they are weighted.

In other words, each portfolio has a very similar number of permanent supportive, affordable and fee-managed units. This balance makes each portfolio manageable in terms of the support available to the onsite staff and builds redundancy into the way that the central office oversees the operations of each site.

E: What challenges do you face in terms of resilience to climate change and natural disasters in Miami? 

SR: I think most of the challenges faced in Miami are related to water intrusion. This seems to be more of a year-round issue rather than just during the hurricane season. 

Problems with roofs as well as the building envelope are issues that we deal with often. For example, I imagine that properties in South Florida are probably having to paint and waterproof the envelope at a higher frequency than the rest of the country.  

E: How has Carrfour historically approached the resilience of your properties? 

SR: Carrfour has done a very good job retrofitting existing properties with wind resistant windows. To date, we probably only have one or two properties that are currently using the mechanical shutters.

All of our new developments have generators, wind-resistant windows and, in some cases, deployable flood barriers.

In terms of future projects, our development team is creating design guidelines that will incorporate features into our properties that make them more resilient to climate change and natural disasters.

E: Please share your experience with the Keep Safe Miami program and Building Protect Assessment Tool. 

I felt the tool was very user friendly, especially if you are at the site and going through the questions in real time. Each answer – depending on what it is – opens a different set of questions to follow up on the answer provided. 

More importantly, the assessment tool generates a report that makes specific recommendations. These recommendations are weighed in terms of critical need, which makes prioritizing decision making easier from an operational standpoint.


E: What’s next now that you’ve completed assessments on some of your buildings? 

SR: We are in the process of getting some elevation certificates to further inform Carrfour’s next steps. We are also planning to address some ground floor areas with sump pumps where possible as well as retrofitting deployable flood barriers

E: Now that you have identified priorities, what challenges remain in addressing these issues?

SR: I think the greatest issue is making capital available specifically for the mitigation of natural disaster and climate risks. 

Other issues also include the reliability of some contractors in South Florida. Often work is done and needs to be redone. 

If Enterprise made available a list of contractors with a proven track record of addressing these sorts of issue that would be something that would go a long way for affordable housing providers.