For six weeks, Florida Matters will explore how the state's population boom is affecting important issues in our lives. In "Our Changing State," we’ll share stories from local residents about how change has affected them. We'll then invite experts in to answer questions you and your neighbors submitted through an online survey about each of these issues.
In the first part of our series, we’re talking about housing.
Florida’s the fastest growing state in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than 22 million people now call this state home. Since 2010, Florida has added an average of 287,000 more residents a year. That’s made finding housing a challenge for many.
In an interview, we hear from Tampa residents Charles George and Carolyn Lang about the difficulties they encountered while purchasing their home.
Host Matthew Peddie is joined by Florida Atlantic University business professor, associate dean and real estate expert Ken H. Johnson, and Florida Housing Coalition CEO Ashon Nesbitt.
They discussed the impact of Florida’s surging population on housing — from the high price of homeownership to the demand for rental housing.
Here's a sampling of questions submitted through our online survey:
How do housing costs look when compared to the rest of the country? -- Mary Beth Koch, Tampa
(Ken): Housing in Florida, in both to own and to rent in, are both at record highs for this part of the country. This is a lot different than we were looking at 15 years ago. Rents are high, home prices are high, but this time around, rents are supporting home prices, so we’re not expecting a crash. But we’re probably talking about a prolonged period of unaffordable housing.
Do local governments have the ability to make laws and zoning changes that would help workforce families? — Dave Coleman, Tampa
(Ashon): Absolutely. They do, through land use and zoning, have the ability to incentivize the development of housing that's affordable to the local workforce. And that's something that has long been a part of the regime, even supported at the state level for local governments to do that. And so, we've had very recent legislation to give local governments even more tools to provide or incentivize the development of affordable housing, where it makes sense. Land is running out particularly along our existing coastal areas. There's still plenty of coastal area where people want to live, but in our metro areas, definitely we're going to get more dense. And so, where do we want to focus that? Focusing that on areas where it does make sense, along our commercial corridors, along areas that have access to transit. So we're both creating good affordable housing that has access to opportunity and kind of lessening the impacts at the edges of our of our metropolitan areas for sure. And local governments do have quite a bit of tools that they can access or put into place to encourage housing development as affordable.
Does more “in-fill” housing help reduce the traffic, rising rents and unaffordability associated with single family sprawl? -- Giancarlo Rodriguez, Orlando
(Ken): Absolutely. We’re going to get a little bit more dense in terms of density, we're going to be a little bit more vertical, few more people are going to live closer in close proximity to one another. But in-fill is a concept that as time has come, we all want to live in Florida with single family lots. The land just isn't there anymore, because we all want to live in or near the coast with a few exceptions of the Orlando area. So we just have to understand that the density is going to rise a little bit, the elevation of our units are going to rise a little bit, but we're not going to wake up and be New York City. I forget the number of hundreds of miles of coast that we have in Florida. This just isn't going to happen. Not in our lifetimes, not in our grandchildren's lifetime.
Next week: The environment
You can listen to the full conversation by clicking on the “Listen” button above. Or you can listen on the WUSF app under “Programs & Podcasts.
