It’s been two weeks since Sean Jeremy’s landlord raised his rent beyond what he could afford. For now, the only place he can afford to live is in his car.
Soaring rents in South Florida are putting others like Jeremy is a similar bind. With housing costs too high, concern is growing that more people will find themselves priced onto the streets.
By Wendy Rhodes | Palm Beach Post | June 12, 2021
For nearly two decades, local government leaders, developers and advocates have brainstormed and promulgated different measures to address a chronic sore spot: Ever-increasing housing costs have made the American Dream of homeownership unattainable for broad swaths of people.
“The dirty little secret is that the issue never got better, especially for people at the lower end of the income scale,” said Suzanne P. Cabrera, president and CEO of the Housing Leadership Council of Palm Beach County. “Even if we took everybody’s wages and doubled them today, Palm Beach County is still unaffordable.”
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The hurdle has only gotten higher in the past few years, courtesy of a pandemic, frigid winter weather across the northern United States and a new federal tax lawthat have driven more people here, adding to the competition among buyers for homes in a relentless seller’s market.
So,the word is clearly out again:Palm Beach County is a great place to live and work. Just ask the thousands of folks from out of state who are flocking here to retire, raise their families, open businesses or buy second homes to soak up some of Florida’s fabulous winter sunshine.
That popularity has only worsened the already difficult panorama for prospective low- and middle-income homebuyers. As high earners from other states relocate to Palm Beach County, increased housing demand, coupled with limited inventory, are driving up costs. Locals are further being priced out of the housing market, forcing them to commute from other counties, double up with roommates or even move away.
Cabrera’s organization, the Housing Leadership Council, was founded in 2006 to ensure the area has enough affordable housing for the service and mid-level workers who make up the bulk of the county’s residents.
The group works in conjunction with local academics, nonprofits and government agencies to identify the extent of the need for affordable and workforce housing, as well as strategies to tackle that demand. Finding solutions, however, is easier said than done, she points out.
The council right now is tackling an ominous trend for housing. Namely, the county is losing significantly more affordable housing units each year than it is building, and adequate funding to back rent vouchers to meet immediate housing needs is simply non-existent.
To change that direction, the Housing Leadership Council is working on a proposal to present to county commissioners in March about how to address these growing problems….
Jocelyn Bennett paints her daughters’ toenails, not bothered by the strong scent of nail polish filling the room at the HomeTown Studios in Orlando. The girls show off their pink toes, toddling around the small pay-by-the-week hotel room, one of many the Bennetts have called home since the pandemic began and they got evicted.
It’s just one room with a bathroom with not enough space to even open the front door all the way. But it’s got a stove and a fridge, and it’s better than living in their car or outside. There are two beds, one for mom and dad, and the other is shared by their five kids who are all under 6 years old.
These days, a bottle of Dollar Tree nail polish is one of the only luxuries Jocelyn Bennett can give them.
“That’s the worst feeling to have is I can’t provide for my kids. That’s probably the worst feeling you can have as a parent, not knowing what to do and calling 2-1-1 and them not knowing what to do,” Jocelyn, 26, said, referring to United Way’s emergency hotline.
In March 2020, Jocelyn lost her nursing assistant job at a senior living facility. Dexter, her husband, had been between jobs, finding work through a temp agency. They were already on food stamps. In April, they couldn’t cover the rent. Their landlord told them they needed to be out in 30 days. And the family became homeless in a matter of weeks.
“It was a downward spiral after that,” Dexter, 36, said. “Since COVID started, we’ve been living in hotels.”
For renters in Florida, this is what eviction can look like. It doesn’t always play out in a courtroom because many renters can’t get a court hearing, which results in their landlord automatically winning the case. Some people, like the Bennetts, leave without responding to an eviction notice because they don’t think they can fight it.
Housing experts argue Florida has some of the harshest eviction laws in the country, written so landlords can evict people as quickly as possible and without going to court. During the COVID-19 outbreak, those landlord-friendly laws, coupled with the state’s severe shortage of affordable homes, rising rents and years of stagnant wages, left thousands of suddenly jobless renters exposed. And even after the government ordered a halt to eviction proceedings and federal dollars were made available to help people pay rent, many tenants were not spared.
Black Floridians, who were already more likely to lose their job to the pandemic and die from COVID-19, were even more likely to be locked out of their homes. In a mostly Black part of downtown Orlando, for example, renters were about six times as likely to face eviction than in another mostly white part of downtown, according to new data compiled for the Orlando Sentinel by the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida.
Shimberg estimates more than 57,000 evictions were filed in Florida just from March 2020 to mid-December, pushing families like the Bennetts into homelessness at a time the government was ordering people to quarantine.
Central Florida renters, many of them the same low-wage workers who power the region’s tourism economy, were particularly vulnerable. Even before the pandemic and mass layoffs upended their lives, they lived paycheck to paycheck in a town where rent keeps climbing and wages don’t budge.
So when the bottom fell out of the tourism and service industries, there was no safety net for them, and Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature did nothing to help.
“They are the ones who face wrongful eviction, they are the ones who can’t get living wages, they are the ones who are struggling to find reliable public transportation. It’s all on them,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat from Orlando. “And when we ignore these crises with affordable housing, eviction, wages, public transit — we’re doing it on the backs of working people.
“They are the ones who pay.”
Florida ranks among the states with the worst affordable rental housing shortages in the nation, data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition show. New housing has been added to try to keep up with the state’s population growth, but developers have largely ignored building places to live for low-income residents.
Over the past 20 years in Florida, nearly 200,000 rental units priced under $1,000 per month disappeared as landlords increased rents. At the same time, about 1 million units priced above $1,000 were added, the Shimberg Center found…
Angie DiMichele | Sarasota Herald-Tribune | April 30, 2021
Nearly 1,000 people move to Florida every day, making Florida the second fastest-growing state in the country. Yet as housing demand increases, there are not enough options to meet the demand of those who need affordable housing.
No state has an adequate supply of affordable housing, according to The Gap, an annual report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, published in March. Florida is one of the five states that are most challenging for extremely low-income renters to find affordable housing, along with Nevada, California, Oregon and Arizona.
Florida has only 28 affordable homes available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, according to the report.
Jaimie Ross, president and chief executive officer of Florida Housing Coalition, said the state’s housing crisis boils down to the fact that housing prices exceed the local workers’ incomes, what she called “a serious mismatch between what people earn in Florida and what housing costs in Florida.”
Extremely low-income renter households are those who make at or below the poverty line or 30% of the area median income, depending on which is greater, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development definitions. Low-income households are those who earn 80% of the area median income or less.
Only 36% of extremely low-income renters are working people, many with jobs in the retail and service industries that were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. The remaining percentage is made up of seniors, households with disabilities and students or single parents or caregivers.
“Our housing prices, our rents are set at whatever the market will bear, and our workforce in Florida can’t afford those rents and can’t afford those housing prices,” Ross said.
Over half of the country’s largest occupations do not pay a high enough hourly wage on average for its workers to afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment, the report says.
The report says full-time workers need to make $19.56 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment and make $23.96 an hour to afford a two bedroom on average across the country.
Nick VinZant, a senior research analyst at QuoteWizard, has researched the growing gap between housing costs and income nationwide. His report says Florida has the seventh-highest disparity between housing costs and income.
In Florida, the median income has increased by slightly more than 20% since 2012 while median housing prices have almost doubled, increasing by 99.3%. Compared to the rest of the country, Florida’s housing price increase was above the national average, yet the rise in Floridians’ incomes was about $5,000 less than in other states, VinZant said.
For a household earning the current median income of $55,660, VinZant said these workers may…
Mr. Friedrich is a journalist who writes about the social problems caused by gentrification.
Nonprofits that purchase land, build homes on it and sell them below market rate are giving low-income buyers a chance.
If anyone knows how gentrification has displaced Black working-class residents in Atlanta, it’s Makeisha Robey, a preschool teacher. During her two decades living in the city, she has watched affordable apartment complexes vanish as new developments arise and wealthier, white residents move in.
After being priced out of renting in a series of neighborhoods, Ms. Robey, a 43-year-old single mother, became determined to buy a house of her own. “Being able to build some kind of equity, being able to have this home base where your family can come visit,” Ms. Robey said, “I wanted that for myself.”
That wish became a reality when she discovered the Atlanta Land Trust, an organization that creates and protects affordable housing. Community land trusts are locally run nonprofits that purchase land, build homes on it and sell those homes below market rate to low-income buyers. The trust keeps the deed for the land, leasing it to homeowners who sign a long-term agreement to limit their home’s resale price, so that it stays affordable into the future.
“You make a one-time investment in creating a community land trust unit, and that unit is affordable forever,” said Amanda Rhein, executive director of the Atlanta Land Trust. Community leaders founded the organization in 2009 during the development of the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile rail park — similar to New York City’s High Line — that has inflated housing prices in historically Black neighborhoods nearby.
The Atlanta Land Trust focuses on low-income buyers who make between 60 percent and 80 percent of the local median income and can readily support a traditional mortgage. Those interested must still work with commercial realtors and lenders, which can be an uphill climb for first-time buyers. But that challenge has eased as the model becomes more familiar. So far, the organization has sold 15 land trust homes; it aims to build 300 by 2025. “It creates a pathway to homeownership,” Ms. Rhein said.
In 2019, Ms. Robey became one of the organization’s first buyers when she closed on a small cottage with a fenced yard in southwest Atlanta’s gentrifying Pittsburgh neighborhood for $103,000 — well below the rapidly inflating median price of around $227,000 today. She explained that it was renovated by a local neighborhood development partner before being transferred to the land trust: “It helped me come into the house with the confidence that I’ll be able to live here happily, I’ll be able to maintain it, I’ll be safe.” Ms. Robey said that she would not have been able to qualify to buy a home the conventional way.
The influence that powerful private real estate interests exert on American city governments has caused housing prices and rents to soar over the past decades, increasingly placing homeownership out of reach for families of color, and Black Americans like Ms. Robey in particular. Community land trusts form a promising corrective to this trend. By removing land from the speculative market, they keep housing affordable for first-time homeowners — especially low-income people of color.
In America, community land trusts have always been rooted in racial equity. Unlike other types of land trusts, like those formed to conserve land by restricting development, they were devised specifically to prevent the displacement of…