What can Florida do to address housing affordability?

A Florida State University director says the state's housing market is becoming "increasingly unaffordable," citing supply as the issue.

This comes as experts, lawmakers and local officials try to come up with solutions. For example, the idea of homeowners building "granny flats" — also known as accessory dwelling units — in their backyard. Also, the push to reduce or eliminate most property taxes.

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The St. Pete Catalyst has also previously reported how St. Petersburg is the first Florida city to adopt new legislation known as "Yes in God's backyard." This helps city officials and area faith leaders to expedite and bolster affordable housing opportunities by using vacant land owned by religious institutions.

On "The Florida Roundup," Sam Staley, director of the DeVoe Moore Center at FSU's College of Social Sciences and Public Policy, talked about how building housing is more complex than it seems, and that he doesn't believe many governments have stepped up to address issues.

The interview below has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Broadly describe the state of housing affordability in Florida.

We have gone from a state which was one of the most affordable in the nation, and in fact, when I was looking at the data back in the mid 2000s, we were very much in trending toward more affordability, and then really beginning in the late 2000s and then into the 2010s and then just accelerating after COVID-19, we've become increasingly unaffordable.

Housing affordability is a function of demand and supply.

In the United States, a lot of people don't seem to understand this. We can't prevent people from moving to Florida. We have a federal constitutional prohibition on preventing other people from moving among the states. So that's not going to go away.

We're adding hundreds of thousands of people to Florida every year, and so we have to take the demand as given. There's nothing we can do about that as a state. So the problem is on the supply side. And the reality is, we have not been building enough housing.

I think a lot of people have been focusing on the top number, which is how many units are we adding? But it's a lot more complicated than that, because we need to have the right housing for the right people in the right place.

It's not just about adding the number of units, although I think that definitely helps, but we also have to be thinking about making sure that we are accommodating the different kinds of housing for the different segments.

What we've seen, particularly in Florida, is that there's been a big squeeze in what we call workforce housing that for that household of $60,000 a year, $70,000 a year, $80,000 a year, we're just not building enough housing in those categories, because we're not allowing that housing to be built. We're not getting filtering of the old housing down to the segments they use, and that's typically where our affordable units come from.

What forces are at play preventing the right kind of housing from being built?

A lot of it comes down to local planning and zoning.

We have this phenomenon called "Not in My Backyard." What happens is someone comes in and says, "I want to put 300 units of housing," and then what happens is people look at that and say, "That's going to change the way my city or neighborhood looks, I don't want that."

So when people go into the local planning approval board and the hearing, often, what they're doing is they're saying, "I want to keep my neighborhood the same." And so there's a stasis that builds into it, and then we have a very conservative process for making these decisions that tends to default to the people — the citizens in the room.

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So part of it's intentional. Don't want it in my backyard. Part of it's process.

And then there's a third element to it, which I think is very underappreciated. We don't hold our local communities accountable for the housing elements of the comprehensive plan. They may talk about adding housing, but if they fall short of that, there are no consequences. They don't lose elections. No one's fired, no one's held accountable for that.

Florida lawmakers have passed laws and are working on new legislation that supporters say encourages the building of more housing in local communities. Critics point out that the result is less control over zoning and density by local communities. It's called the Live Local Act. Has this strategy been proven to provide housing supply, while not hurting maybe the housing value of the existing stock?

It's unclear at this point, with these kinds of reforms, whether we're looking at California, Florida, Montana or wherever, with these reforms having been enacted, what the actual consequences are going to be.

I've actually been a long-time skeptic of the state coming in and telling locals what to do. But I think in the long run, that's where you get sustainable solutions, policy solutions at any rate. But the legislature is acting because, in my view, this is purely my opinion, local governments have not stepped up to the plate to address these serious problems.

How do you increase supply and make it more affordable without harming the value?

You don't want a shock of new units to come in. Unfortunately, we are so far behind in our housing supply — there's going to be a lot of pressure to just approve units and large chunks.

And that's essentially what's happening up in the state legislature. They're saying, "We got to get a handle on this. The locals, the counties, and the cities, aren't dealing with this. We're just going to try to open this up so we can get more units."

And it's not much more complicated than that, because most of those legislators in the House, in the Senate, really don't want to be messing with this, but they feel like they have to. It's some public policy crisis at this point.

And so the question is, how do you do that?

I think we need to focus on the impacts of the development, not on conformance to rules or plans or the zoning code.

So the question when you have someone proposing a unit is, how's that going to impact my community? How's it going to impact me?

Most of the time, those impacts can be narrowed down to pretty tangible things. What's happening to stormwater runoff, what's happening to road congestion, what's happening to all of these public facilities that we are providing to our tax dollars.

These are actually measurable. So if we focused on that, I think we'd be make a lot more headway, rather than if it conformed to the comprehensive land use plan.

This story was compiled from interviews conducted by Tom Hudson for "The Florida Roundup."