Tyler Gervasi moved out of his mother’s place about three years ago when the family relocated from Colorado to Sarasota, splitting rent with two other roommates at an apartment complex near University Town Center.
But even after squeezing three people in a two-bedroom unit, the 24-year-old couldn’t cover all his other living expenses on his salary at a local vape shop. He couldn’t even afford a car.
When the complex raised rent the following year, Gervasi moved back in with his mother. He now helps cover bills by paying her $650 a month.
“You have to have two jobs,” Gervasi said about the cost of rent. “And then what’s the point of having your own place when you have to spend all your time at work?”
Across the Suncoast, one full-time job is no longer enough to cover basic rent and utilities for a growing number of residents, who must take on extra hours or side gigs to keep a roof over their heads, according to a new report.
The fair market rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment in Sarasota and Manatee counties is now $1,846 a month, according to a new National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report. To cover that cost comfortably, a renter would need to earn more than $35 an hour.
Yet the typical renter here falls 40% short, earning just $21.81 an hour.
That gap is pushing tens of thousands of households into unstable situations, paying more than half of their income on rent, the threshold at which housing is considered “severely cost-burdened” under federal standards. It leaves little room for essentials like food, childcare or healthcare.
For renters earning the minimum wage of $13 an hour, they would need to work 115 hours a week — nearly three full-time jobs — to afford a basic two-bedroom.
Those harsh realities reflect a deepening crisis on the Suncoast, where rent has surged, wages have lagged and the supply of affordable homes has failed to keep pace. Today, many of the region’s most common jobs — from teachers and secretaries to construction workers and restaurant staff — don’t come close to covering housing costs.
In four Suncoast ZIP codes, renters must earn more than $50 an hour to afford a rent there. Few areas of Florida are worse.
“A lot of people are leaving places like Sarasota and moving out of the state because they can’t afford it,” said Jack McCabe, a Florida real estate consultant. “Even developers that specialized in affordable housing in the past are doing only luxury because they can’t pencil it out.”
“If Florida hasn’t felt the pain of it yet, it’s definitely coming,” he said. “You’re going to lose a lot of seniors and service workers.”
Former Sarasota city manager Marlon Brown, who now works as the director of government affairs for the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, said housing costs made it difficult to fill positions during his time with the city. Candidates who initially accepted a job had to pass after they were unable to find a place to live in their budget.
“Even though we were paying a really good salary,” he said, “they couldn’t afford to come here.”
A widening gap: Sarasota-Bradenton rents remain out of reach
From the newly built, mixed-use communities of Wellen Park and Lakewood Ranch Waterside — where rental units are opening alongside shops and restaurants — to the luxury apartment towers rising in Bradenton and downtown Sarasota, the Suncoast’s building boom is hard to miss.
Cranes dot the skyline. Leasing banners advertise rooftop lounges, pet spas and “resort-style living.” But for many of the workers who keep the region running — restaurant staff, health aides, construction crews — the cost of living in these communities remains far out of reach.
More than 91,000 people in the Suncoast region live in rental housing. Half of them cannot afford it.
“Florida has definitely in recent years become worse,” Dan Emmanuel, one of the lead authors of the Out of Reach report, told Suncoast Searchlight. “The places that typically stand out are Orlando, Miami and you guys (in Sarasota-Bradenton).”
The full-time earnings needed for renters to afford a two-bedroom range from around $25 per hour in Arcadia and parts of Englewood to more than double that for Lakewood Ranch, the University Town Center corridor, Longboat and Siesta Key.
Renters living in those four Suncoast ZIP codes must make as much as $110,000 a year just to afford a basic place to live.
The crisis comes as rental housing prices have nearly doubled over the past decade in some complexes, with area market-rate monthly rents increasing by $1,000 from January 2020 to January 2024.
That’s what happened at Marigot Bay Apartments near the corner of McIntosh and Bee Ridge roads in Sarasota. Rents for one of the two-bedroom, two-bathroom floor plans in the complex doubled from 2016 to 2023, peaking at $3,570 per month, according to archived rates online.
They have recently dropped as low as $2,085, depending on the specific unit, but that’s still hundreds of dollars more than they were a decade ago — and well beyond the area’s fair-market price.
Even professional workers are feeling the squeeze, as soaring rents outpace the wages needed to live on the Suncoast.
Sarah Reno, a grant writer for a local nonprofit serving youth and families, moved to Sarasota in 2020 and rented a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a pool off Cattlemen Road for $1,675. Five years later, that same house rents for $2,500.
Reno no longer lives in that home — and says she couldn’t afford the current rent or continue working in nonprofits without her partner’s financial support.
“That was the only reason I was able to take this job,” she said.
Meanwhile, wages have risen only modestly, experts said.
A steady uptick in luxury development over the past few decades has widened the gap – creating more demand for basic housing from services workers like construction jobs and lawn crews needed to build and maintain those posh new communities, while simultaneously skyrocketing real estate and land prices.
Florida ranks among the 10 least affordable states for renters — and the Suncoast is one of the hardest-hit regions. Only areas like South Florida, Tampa, West Palm Beach, the Keys and Naples have higher rents that are considered even more out of reach.
Statewide, a household must earn $77,522 a year to afford rent for a typical two-bedroom apartment with utilities to meet the 30% benchmark, according to the report.
The “Out of Reach” housing wages data is based on HUD Fair Market Rents, which measure estimates of what a family moving today can expect to pay for a modest rental home – not what all renters are currently paying. The report also uses data from the U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal sources for its methodology.
The trend has pushed more residents – teachers, health aides, childcare workers – into a paycheck-to-paycheck reality where they’re earning too much to qualify for government assistance but not enough to make ends meet. More are now turning to charities for help.
Josh Dunn, a senior vice president at United Way Suncoast, said wage growth isn’t keeping pace with rising costs: “You’d be lucky to find a place for $1,900 a month with the type of space a family needs.”
Landlords feeling strain say quick correction not likely
Ed Taylor has been investing in real estate for decades, growing a portfolio in south Sarasota County that now includes more than a dozen single-family homes.
For several months, he has lowered rents at his properties as he’s scrambled to fill vacancies. Taylor pointed to an article last month in Reason Magazine that highlighted Sarasota as leading the nation in a rental price drop — with a freefall of about 43% in prices.
Reason cites data from Five Star Cash Offer, a real-estate investment firm specializing in cash deals. The analysis notes rents inside the city have plummeted from $3,290 a year ago to $1,886 as of January.
Even with his own rents trending downward, Taylor is skeptical of just how steep the drop cited by Reason has been. Taylor, who leads the Sarasota Real Estate Investors Association, said many of his members just don’t believe it.
Another July report from national data and analytics firm CoStar points to more than 4,250 local apartment units built last year. Of them, about 2 in 5 remain empty. That’s pushed up Sarasota’s vacancy rate to its highest this decade — standing at nearly 16%, according to CoStar.
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Landlords also have seen drastic increases in their own costs, making it difficult for them to respond to the changing rental landscape. Land prices are up from historic norms, building material is more expensive and federal crackdowns on immigration are creating worker challenges, experts said. The cost of insurance and taxes also have increased from successive hurricanes.
For newer landlords who still have mortgages on their properties, lowering rent may not be possible, Taylor said.
“I’m not crying in my soap over here,” he said. “But you have taxes going up with unashamed abandon while my insurance is off the charts.”
Perla Whitaker similarly manages more than 100 annual and short-term leasing properties in the area. She said during the COVID pandemic, droves of new residents came to Florida from states like New York and California, where they were accustomed to high rents – driving up prices.
Many of them then purchased houses here during the inflated market, returned back to their home states and now want to rent out those properties to cover the mortgages. But demand has since softened, she said.
“We have a lot of rentals on the market, so prices are coming down,” Whitaker said. “But a lot of renters still can’t afford it because it’s not as cheap as it should be.”
For renters like Michel Fernandez, even the recent dip in prices hasn’t made it any easier to find an apartment.
The 49-year-old Cuban immigrant, who makes his living as a painter, told Suncoast Searchlight that he’s looking for a place to live after moving out of the home he shared with his girlfriend following a breakup.
A five-year resident of Sarasota, Fernandez recently started his own company, MFS Painting, but work has been slow. He said he hopes to find somewhere that will cost him no more than $800 a month, far lower than the average apartment.
“I’m looking on Facebook Marketplace for a room to rent,” he said. “Every year, rent goes up. I don’t know how we do it.”
Community leaders push for more housing solutions
Community leaders say solving the crisis will require policies that encourage more affordable housing — including stronger support for low-income renters.
But political and economic hurdles remain. Sarasota County Commissioner Tom Knight said a strong anti-development mindset among residents frustrated by “over-development” has made it difficult to support the kind of housing density needed to meaningfully address the shortage.
Compounding the problem: Market-rate apartments are more profitable and easier to finance than low-income housing, which often depends on government incentives that can be unpopular in the region’s predominantly Republican electorate.
Knight said he’d back options like selling surplus county land to private developers who commit to building affordable housing.
“All options need to be on the table,” Knight told Suncoast Searchlight. “What we really need is a strategy to help the people who are employed and fall through the cracks.”
Greater Sarasota Chamber President Heather Kasten said that, for the past two years, the organization has held summits on affordable housing. She highlighted recent progress in local policy and the widespread shift among elected leaders to recognize the problem.
“There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” Kasten said.
The solution requires more than just old-fashioned subsidies — and it needs to address everyone from first-time teachers to the homeless, said Jon Thaxton, director of policy and advocacy for the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
A former Sarasota County commissioner with three generations of real estate experience in his family, Thaxton said he often hears that increased density will fix the market. But that alone won’t close the vast gap between supply and demand.
Instead, he said, it takes a strategic combination of government, private and philanthropic resources coordinating to address needs.
“We hear it all over town — with all aspects of housing — that things are improving,” Thaxton said. “It’s a true statement. But if you’re drowning in 25 feet of water, and now the water is only 20 feet, you’re still going to drown. The bottom line is housing is still out of reach … It’s a terrible place to be.”
He pointed to a recent housing report compiled by four local foundations, including Gulf Coast Community Foundation and Suncoast Searchlight’s founding donor, Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation. The Action Plan highlights a myriad of similar data all painting a picture of an ongoing affordable housing catastrophe.
The report addresses the need to reform zoning and land-use regulations to spur more affordable housing, including large-scale multi-family developments. It also calls for programs that would guarantee certain homes are affordable in massive new real estate projects.
“It’s not a menu,” Thaxton said. “You don’t get to pick one appetizer, one entree and dessert. We need most of them because the problem is so acute. We have one of the worst housing crises in the country.”
Josh Salman is a senior investigative reporter/deputy editor and Derek Gilliam is an investigative watchdog reporter for Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
This story was originally published by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom delivering investigative journalism to Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
