Editorial: Florida's Housing Math No Longer Works for the People Who Live Here

Florida just posted a record. In June, the statewide median sales price for an existing single-family home reached 432,000 dollars, the highest figure ever recorded in the state, and closed sales rose 9.3 percent from a year earlier. On its own, that is a healthy market. Read alongside everything else Floridians are paying, it describes a state pricing out the workforce that keeps it running.

The Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate steady in a range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent this week, the fifth consecutive hold. That decision did nothing for buyers, because 30-year mortgage rates follow long-term Treasury yields rather than the Fed's overnight rate, and those yields have pushed mortgage costs near a one-year high. Meanwhile property insurance, though showing genuine signs of moderation after several years of legislative reform, still costs Florida homeowners more than homeowners almost anywhere else in the country.

Stack those three numbers and the arithmetic becomes clear. The cost of occupying the median Florida home, principal, interest, taxes, and insurance, has risen faster than Florida wages for most of the past five years. That is not a market cycle. It is a structural mismatch, and it deserves to be treated as one.

The problem is the total, not any single line

Florida's public debate tends to isolate each component. Property insurance gets its own legislative sessions and its own reform packages. Property taxes get their own constitutional amendment, now headed to the November ballot as Amendment 3. Mortgage rates get attributed to Washington and treated as weather.

Households do not experience these as separate problems. They experience one monthly payment. A homeowner whose insurance premium falls by 8 percent while assessed value rises and mortgage costs stay elevated has not gotten cheaper housing. A first-time buyer who benefits from an expanded homestead exemption that phases in over years still has to qualify for the loan today.

Treating the components separately also allows each to be declared a success on its own terms while the total keeps climbing. Insurance rate filings can show decreases. Sales volume can show recovery. Median price can show appreciation, which is reported as good news. None of that answers whether a teacher, a nurse, a line cook, or a sheriff's deputy can afford to live in the county where they work.

Amendment 3 is a real answer to part of the question

The property tax amendment now before Florida voters would expand the share of a homesteaded home's value shielded from non-school taxes and would tighten the annual assessment growth cap on non-homesteaded and commercial property from 10 percent to 5 percent. For a homeowner already in a house, that is meaningful relief, and the case for it is not frivolous.

But the measure carries a recurring revenue reduction that state economists have estimated at roughly 12 billion dollars, and that money currently funds county governments, municipalities, and special districts. Schools are largely insulated by the structure of the proposal. Sheriff's offices, fire rescue, road maintenance, drainage, and stormwater are not.

Here is the part that gets less attention: property tax relief flows to people who already own homes. It does nothing for renters except indirectly, and it does nothing to add housing supply. A policy that reduces carrying costs for existing owners while leaving supply unchanged pushes in exactly one direction on price.

Meanwhile, the ballot language itself is now in litigation, with a Leon County judge weighing whether the title, which promises to save homes from excessive property taxes, informs voters or argues to them. That the state's signature housing affordability measure is entangled in a fight over its own wording, three weeks before a primary, is its own commentary on how this policy was assembled.

Supply is the variable nobody wants to touch

Florida's population growth has been the state's defining economic fact for two generations. Housing production has not kept pace with it in the places where jobs are, which are the coastal metros and the corridors between them.

The obstacles are local and unglamorous. Zoning that permits only detached single-family homes on large lots across most residentially zoned land. Parking minimums that make small infill projects financially impossible. Review processes that add years and carrying cost to entitlement. Impact fee structures that load the full cost of growth onto the newest units, which is to say onto the households least able to absorb it.

The Legislature has moved on some of this, including through the Live Local Act, which preempted certain local restrictions for qualifying affordable developments and created tax incentives. Those were serious steps. They have not yet produced units at the scale the arithmetic requires.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the levers that would meaningfully increase supply sit with county commissions and city councils, and are exercised in hearings attended overwhelmingly by existing homeowners with a rational interest in the value of what they already own. That is not a scandal. It is a predictable outcome of how the process is designed, and it will not change on its own.

Insurance reform worked, and it is not enough

Credit where it is earned. Florida's litigation and claims reforms genuinely changed the market. Carriers have returned, Citizens Property Insurance has reduced rates for most policyholders rather than raising them, and the depopulation of Citizens back into the private market has proceeded. Those are real results, and skeptics who predicted otherwise were wrong.

But Florida's insurance costs are not primarily a function of legal system abuse. They are a function of the fact that 23 million people live on a low-lying peninsula in the path of Atlantic hurricanes, with the highest concentration of insured coastal property in the country. Reinsurance markets price that risk globally, and no state legislature sets those prices.

Reforms that reduce friction and fraud lower the premium around the risk. They do not lower the risk. Mitigation does: roof standards, opening protection, elevation, and land use decisions that stop putting new rooftops in the most exposed places. Florida has strong building codes and has funded mitigation grant programs. Both deserve more, and both pay back over decades rather than election cycles.

What we would like to see

First, publish the total. The state should report a standard annual affordability figure for each metropolitan area that combines mortgage, taxes, and insurance against local median household income. Policymakers can then be held to whether that number improved, rather than to whichever component happens to be moving favorably.

Second, tie state incentives to supply. Housing dollars, infrastructure grants, and transportation funding should flow preferentially to jurisdictions that have actually permitted housing at rates matched to their job growth.

Third, be honest with voters about Amendment 3. If it passes, county services will be funded differently, and residents should hear specifically how before they vote, not afterward.

Fourth, fund mitigation at a scale that matches the exposure. Every dollar that hardens a roof reduces a claim that would otherwise be paid by every policyholder in the state.

What the state has already tried

It would be unfair to suggest Tallahassee has ignored this. The Live Local Act preempted certain local restrictions for qualifying affordable developments, created tax exemptions, and put real money behind housing programs. Insurance reforms passed across multiple sessions changed the litigation environment and brought carriers back into the state.

Both were serious efforts, and both produced measurable results. Citizens Property Insurance reduced rates rather than raising them this year, which almost nobody predicted three years ago. Housing production in Florida has run ahead of most of the country.

The honest assessment is that these measures slowed the deterioration without reversing it. Prices reached a record in June. Insurance costs remain the highest or near highest in the nation. The gap between what Florida housing costs and what Florida jobs pay has not closed.

That is not an argument that the policies failed. It is an argument that they were sized to a smaller problem than the one that exists.

The local government bind

County commissions and city councils are in a genuinely difficult position, and it is worth saying so plainly. They are asked to approve more housing while their constituents, who are overwhelmingly existing homeowners, show up at hearings to oppose specific projects.

They are simultaneously asked to fund the infrastructure that growth requires: roads, water, sewer, drainage, schools, and public safety. Amendment 3 would reduce the revenue available to do that by an estimated 12 billion dollars recurring, while doing nothing to reduce the obligations.

The result is a system in which every level of government can honestly say it is doing its part while the aggregate outcome gets worse. The state preempts to encourage supply, localities resist to protect existing residents, and voters cut the revenue that would pay for either approach.

Breaking that requires someone to name the tradeoff out loud rather than promising that all three objectives can be achieved simultaneously. They cannot.

What's at stake

Florida's economy runs on people who cannot afford Florida's housing. Hospitality, health care, construction, agriculture, logistics, and education all depend on workers whose wages are set by regional labor markets while their housing costs are set by national and international capital.

When those workers leave, the costs do not disappear. They reappear as unfilled nursing positions, as school districts unable to staff classrooms, as longer emergency response times, as businesses that cannot open a full shift. Several Florida counties are already reporting versions of exactly this.

The November ballot gives voters one lever, and it is a partial one. The larger decisions belong to a Legislature that has shown it will act on housing when it chooses to, and to local governments that hold most of the authority over supply. Floridians should ask candidates in both the August 18 primary and the November general election a single question: what will you do that makes the total monthly cost of living here go down, and how will we know if it worked.