The gap between housing costs and income continues to grow in south Florida, the Miami Herald reports. From 2007 to 2017, Miami-Dade’s median wage rose only 14% while home values shot up 66%. The housing market accommodates affluent out-of town and international buyers while teachers, fire fighters, police officers and service industry personnel can't afford to live where they work. The 2019 State of the Nation's Housing report by Harvard University shows the stock of low-rent units priced under $800 in South Florida’s tri-county region shrinking by 39% between 2011 and 2017, while the number of low-income renters dipped only 2%.
And only one of five new single-family homes built during this period was priced under $200,000. Miami now ranks first when it comes to the percentage of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. It doesn’t take an economics degree to figure out the impact: higher prices for everyone.
Even in a modest neighborhood like North Miami, market-rate rents for a two-bedroom apartment run about $1,900 per month — meaning a family would need to earn about $70,000 per year for the rent to fit under 30 percent of the budget. That’s well above the Miami-Dade median of $50,000.
“The crisis has spread up the income scale over the last five years, so it’s no longer just extremely low-income households,” said Annie Lord, executive director of Miami Homes For All, a non-profit housing advocacy group. “Now you have middle-class and even higher-income people in Miami-Dade who are also [spending more than a third of their monthly income on housing].“
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