Florida Housing Crisis: Shortage, Rents, and the Live Local Act

The Florida housing crisis is a shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes colliding with the fastest population growth in the country, pushing rents, prices, and insurance costs far beyond what most Floridians earn. The state needs to build more than 570,000 additional housing units by 2030 just to keep up with growth,¹ and about 3 million households — 34 percent of the state — already spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.² Lawmakers have responded with sweeping preemption of local zoning and rent rules, but the gap keeps widening.

How Big the Shortage Really Is

Florida added more than 1.8 million people between April 2020 and July 2024, an 8.5 percent jump, and is projected to add 3.2 million more residents by 2030.³ Construction has not tracked that curve. Only 950,000 units were built statewide during the 2010s, compared with 1.62 million during the 2000s.¹

The deficit is concentrated at the bottom of the income ladder. Florida is short roughly 660,000 affordable rental units for households earning below 60 percent of the area median income.⁴ For households at or below 30 percent of AMI, there are only 26 affordable and available rental units for every 100 households — a gap of roughly 425,000 homes.⁵ Between 2019 and 2023, the state added nearly 195,000 renter households; more than 240,000 multifamily units came online during that stretch, yet median rent still climbed from $1,238 to $1,719 a month.

What It Costs to Rent Here Now

A household needs to earn $77,522 a year to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing. That works out to an hourly “housing wage” of $37.27 for a full-time worker. A Florida minimum-wage worker would need to hold nearly three full-time jobs to afford that same apartment.⁶

Half of Florida’s cost-burdened households — roughly 1.5 million — are severely cost-burdened, spending more than 50 percent of income on housing.² Among extremely low-income renters, 82 percent are severely cost-burdened.⁵ Florida is one of just a dozen states where more than half of all renters are cost-burdened, in the same range as California and Nevada.⁷

The pain is not evenly spread. Renters age 55 and older account for 39 percent of cost-burdened low-income renter households statewide.⁴ Regionally, Miami-Dade County’s rate of low-income, cost-burdened households hits 39 percent, while rural Dixie County sits at 9 percent.²

Essential Workers Are Priced Out Too

The squeeze reaches well above the poverty line. Florida has the lowest average teacher pay in the nation, and in many counties the salaries of teachers, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and paramedics fall below the 80 percent AMI threshold that defines “workforce housing.”⁸

In 23 counties, the average firefighter salary does not reach that 80 percent AMI floor for a single person. Law enforcement salaries often fall below it for households of three or more. Monroe County is unaffordable for all four major public-safety occupations at every household size.⁸ Longer commutes, higher turnover, and harder recruiting follow.⁹

Home Prices and the Recent Cooling

Buying is not much easier. In the first half of 2024, the median Florida single-family home sold for $411,600. Homes selling for under $200,000 dropped from 49 percent of all sales in 2014 to just 6 percent in 2024, while homes at $500,000 or more climbed from 9 percent to 36 percent of the market.²

By mid-2026, the market showed signs of softening. The average home value statewide slipped to roughly $377,600, down 3.3 percent year over year.¹⁰ Inventory swelled to 7.47 months of supply, above the roughly six months that signals a balanced market, and homes took a median 84 days to sell in the first quarter of 2026. Forecasters project prices to decline an average of 1.5 percent per year through 2028.¹¹ The relief is modest against the run-up: home prices rose nearly 71 percent between early 2020 and the end of 2024.¹²

Why Builders Can’t Catch Up

Even with demand and political appetite, several forces slow construction and raise the price of every unit that does get built.

Building material prices have risen 41.6 percent since the start of the pandemic, and recent tariff actions add an estimated $10,900 to the cost of a new single-family home.¹³
Construction nationally needed 439,000 new workers in 2025 to meet demand. Florida’s problem is worsened by an aging workforce, a cultural shift away from the trades, and state legislation mandating E-Verify for employers with 25 or more staff, which has driven some undocumented workers out of the construction pipeline.¹³¹⁴
Regulations account for roughly 24 percent of the average new home price, much of it tied to permitting and building codes.¹³
Only 7 percent of residential land in Florida is zoned for multifamily housing.¹

Storm recovery makes the bottleneck worse. After Hurricane Ian in 2022, Lee County issued more than 61,000 permits in eight months, doubling its daily issuance rate and overwhelming staff.¹⁴ A home that once took 12 months to build may now take 15 to 20, with the added cost passed to buyers and renters.

Insurance and the Condo Squeeze

Property insurance is a major second-order driver. Years of insurer insolvencies, litigation, and hurricane losses pushed premiums up and carriers out, sending hundreds of thousands of homeowners to Citizens Property Insurance, the state’s insurer of last resort.

The market has started to steady. After tort reform passed in 2022, 17 new insurance companies entered the Florida market, and Citizens’ policies in force dropped by 50 percent as of January 2025, to roughly 395,000.¹⁵ Several private carriers filed rate decreases for 2026, some in the double digits, and Citizens announced its first rate reduction since 2015. Industry analysts described the market as the healthiest it had been in five years.¹⁶

Condominiums face their own reckoning. After the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South, Senate Bill 4-D required structural milestone inspections and fully funded reserves for residential buildings three stories or taller.¹⁷ Florida has roughly 25,000 condo associations and 1.4 million individual units, with nearly 600,000 units in buildings over 40 years old. Underfunded associations now face large special assessments or steep monthly fee increases, and coverage remains volatile. One 900-unit Miami complex saw a 300 percent premium increase and had to piece together coverage from 11 different carriers.¹⁸ Meanwhile, more than 12,000 affordable units in the Florida Housing Finance Corporation portfolio are set to have their affordability requirements expire between 2024 and 2029.²

Climate Risk Reshapes the Map

Sea levels are projected to rise one to three feet by the end of the century under moderate scenarios, with NOAA’s more aggressive projections putting the figure above six feet by 2100.¹⁹ Flooding frequency in Miami has increased 400 percent over the past decade, and an estimated $400 billion in assets are at risk in the metro alone.²⁰

The market response has been to move investment uphill, a pattern researchers call climate gentrification. In Miami’s Little Haiti, which sits at a relatively high 13 feet of elevation, average property values surged from roughly $99,600 in 2012 to $548,000 in 2022.²⁰ Post-disaster rebuilding tends to produce higher-cost housing, replacing little of the affordable stock destroyed. Low-income homeowners often lack flood insurance entirely, since it is not required when there is no mortgage, and are left without resources after a storm.²¹

Evictions and Homelessness

The affordability gap feeds directly into instability. Florida has the third-largest homeless population in the country.²² The 2025 point-in-time count found 28,498 people experiencing homelessness, a 9 percent decrease from 2024, driven largely by a 19 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness. The state Council on Homelessness identifies a “severe mismatch” between housing supply and the needs of extremely low-income renters as the core driver. Statewide foreclosure filings rose approximately 19 percent between 2023 and 2024.¹²

Governor DeSantis signed HB 1365 in March 2024, barring local governments from allowing homeless encampments on public land. Municipalities must remove individuals from public spaces within five days of a written complaint, and as of January 2025, residents and business owners can sue local governments for failing to act. Central Florida service providers said the law has made it harder to locate and serve people, as many have moved to where they are less likely to be found.²³ Critics argued the law criminalizes homelessness without providing adequate shelter or housing alternatives.²⁴

The Live Local Act and What It Changed

The centerpiece of Florida’s legislative response is the Live Local Act, signed in March 2023 with near-unanimous bipartisan support. It allocated up to $811 million for affordable housing programs and reshaped the relationship between the state and local governments on housing.²⁵

Its core mechanism is a state-level zoning preemption. Local governments must allow multifamily and mixed-use residential development on land zoned for commercial, industrial, or mixed use, so long as at least 40 percent of units are affordable to households earning up to 120 percent of AMI for at least 30 years. Local governments cannot restrict height or density below the highest levels already allowed in their codes, and qualifying projects receive administrative approval without public hearings or board votes.²⁶ The Act mandates property tax exemptions for income-restricted projects and includes a “Yes In God’s Backyard” provision allowing affordable housing on land owned by religious institutions regardless of zoning.²⁷

The Act also eliminated any local authority over rent control. Before the law, municipalities could enact temporary rent stabilization measures during declared housing emergencies with voter approval. That option is now gone. The provision was enacted shortly after voters in Orange County overwhelmingly passed a rent control referendum that was ultimately blocked by an appeals court. Six Democratic state representatives voted against the Act specifically because of the rent control ban.²⁶

Amendments in 2025 broadened the definition of “commercial use,” capped required nonresidential space at 10 percent of a mixed-use project, mandated parking reductions near transit, and added height restrictions near single-family neighborhoods, limiting qualifying projects to 150 percent of the tallest adjacent building or three stories, whichever is higher, up to 10 stories. The Act sunsets in 2033.²⁷

Early implementation has raised concerns about who benefits. Among new construction applications using the law’s “missing middle” tax exemptions, 96.3 percent target units at 120 percent of AMI, the upper end of the eligibility range, rather than lower-income tiers.⁸

In May 2026, Governor DeSantis signed the Infill Redevelopment Act, targeting Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. It requires local governments to administratively approve residential development on parcels of at least five acres that qualify as “environmentally impacted land,” including brownfield sites, capped at 25 units per acre or the average density of adjacent residential zoning, whichever is lower, with a 20-foot buffer next to existing single-family homes.²⁸ The law took effect immediately upon signing.²⁹

Where the Money Comes From

The main state funding source is the Sadowski Housing Trust Fund, fed by a share of the documentary stamp tax on real estate transactions. It splits between the State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP), which sends money to local governments for homeownership activities and rental assistance, and the State Apartment Incentive Loan program (SAIL), which finances developers of affordable rental housing.³⁰

For roughly 20 years, the legislature swept more than $2 billion from the Sadowski Fund into general revenue, which the Florida Housing Coalition estimates cost the state 94,000 affordable housing units that were never built.³¹ Funding has recovered recently. In fiscal year 2024-25, SHIP received $174 million and SAIL and related grants received $234 million, plus $100 million for the Hometown Heroes homebuyer program.³⁰ From fiscal year 2020-21 through 2024-25, the Florida Housing Finance Corporation provided $5.4 billion to add nearly 65,000 new affordable rental units.²

Hometown Heroes, launched in 2022, offers down payment assistance up to $35,000 as a zero-interest, 30-year deferred second mortgage for first-time homebuyers in eligible occupations, including healthcare, education, public safety, and the military.³² The 2025-2026 allocation of $50 million was fully committed within six months, helping more than 3,000 families. Since inception, the program has assisted nearly 25,000 Floridians with over $386 million in down payment funds, generating more than $7.6 billion in first mortgages.³³

What Cities Can No Longer Do

One feature that shapes any conversation about the crisis is how much authority the state has taken back from cities and counties. Beyond eliminating rent control and overriding local zoning for qualifying developments, Section 83.425 of the Florida Statutes expressly supersedes local rules on tenant screening, security deposits, application fees, rental agreement terms, and landlord-tenant rights and responsibilities.³⁴

The framework that remains leans on tax incentives and zoning deregulation to spur private construction, with local governments left mainly to use tools like optional property tax exemptions and surplus land inventories.²⁷ Whether that approach can close a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of units — especially at the lowest income levels, where the market has little reason to build — is the open question at the center of Florida housing policy.

1
Build Florida 2030. Florida Apartment Scarcity Dashboard
2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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11
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12
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13
NAHREP Housing Hub. Building Barriers – How Rising Construction Costs Impact the Housing Affordability Crisis
14
Associated General Contractors of Florida. Construction Industry Worker Supply Shortages Impacting Projects
15
Executive Office of the Governor. Governor Ron DeSantis Announces Major Insurance Rate Relief
16
Spectrum News 13. More Home Insurance Companies Plan Rate Decreases for 2026
17
Intertek. Florida SB 4D Building Safety Law
18
CRC Group. Florida Senate Bill 4-D – What Does It Mean for Condo Associations
19
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20
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21
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22
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23
Click Orlando. Progress Report – Central Florida Homelessness 4 Months After New State Law
24
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25
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26
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27
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28
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29
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30
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31
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32
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33
National Council of State Housing Agencies. Florida Hometown Heroes Program 2025
34
Florida Legislature. Florida Residential Landlord and Tenant Act