The effort is the latest designed to create places to live for families being priced out of home ownership because of the region’s high real-estate prices.

A quarter of people living in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties spend more than half their income to pay for housing, creating a severe financial burden on them, a Harvard University report said last year. Nationally, only the Los Angeles area had a worse percentage.

“Even at the moderate income level, teachers and policemen are finding affordable housing a challenge,” said Ralph Stone, Broward’s housing finance director.

Besides getting developers to include higher numbers of affordable units in their residential projects, local communities have taken to addressing the issue where they can, even on a house-by-house basis: