Miami’s decades long preferential treatment of the real estate industry over community members left the community uniquely vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic on the real estate market. When the pandemic hit and people were given the opportunity to work from home, many decided that they would take their out of state paychecks and move to Miami where the cost of living was significantly lower. Moreover, numerous companies such as Subway, Citadel, Uber and law firms like Sidley Austin and Kirkland & Ellis decided to open up offices in the region, often bringing their out of state work force with them.

The local government encouraged these moves which they saw as bringing prosperity to the city. In fact, the Mayor of the City of Miami, Francis Suarez, famously responded, “How can I help?” on X (formerly Twitter) after Delian Asparouhov, a partner at the San Francisco based venture capital firm Founders Fund, suggested moving Silicon Valley to Miami. 

These moves by high earning individuals and companies meant that property owners stood to profit enormously. And with no laws mandating rent control, they could freely jack up the prices for rent. The competition for housing was fierce. At one point in 2023, there was an average of 22 people vying for each available unit. With such competition, and many new Miamians and investors willing to pay these steep prices for housing, locals lost out and prices continued to climb.

Corporate developers furthermore, saw the population growth in Miami and decided to invest in construction. And, because there was little mandatory inclusionary zoning, they could build as much as they wanted without having to provide significant affordability for the community. Though there are some economists that believe that any new construction will provide relief from rising housing costs, advocates in Miami are skeptical.

 “This solution is very often geared towards the widgets of housing I like to call it,” says Greer, “And look, figuring out how to build the housing is vitally important, someone needs to do that. But it is a wholly insufficient way of looking at the problem and looking at who actually gets to live in these places and be a part of those neighborhoods.”  

“It is a wholly insufficient way of looking at the problem and looking at who actually gets to live in these places and be a part of those neighborhoods.”  

Though new construction has been shown to drive down the price of housing in some communities, Miami is unique in that it doesn’t have an overall housing shortage. In fact, Miami’s overall home vacancy rate in 2023 was 6.6% which exceeds the national average of 5.5%.  For comparison, Boston, which does suffer from a housing shortage, has an overall vacancy rate of about .4%. However, in the affordable housing sector Miami’s vacancy rate is about .5% indicating that though Miami does have a significant supply of housing, because the supply is mainly on the higher end, it is doing little to create affordability. 

“It’s kind of like what happens with roads,” says Carie Penabad, a Miami architect and professor at the University of Miami, “People think ‘I’ll open up the roads and I’m going to get less traffic.’ That has never worked. It will never work because the roads get wider and they get filled up with cars.”  Similarly with housing, as more luxury housing is built, more people are coming in to meet that demand without creating more affordability.

“It’s kind of like what happens with roads…People think ‘I’ll open up the roads and I’m going to get less traffic.’ That has never worked. It will never work because the roads get wider and they get filled up with cars.”   

By 2023 however, the problem had become too great to ignore and Florida’s legislature was forced to address the lack of affordability facing the state’s residents. But even in passing affordable housing legislation, the interests of the developers, real estate groups, and their shareholders are still prioritized over those of low-income individuals.

One such example of this is the Live Local Act, which was a law passed in March of 2023 with the goal of incentivizing affordable housing development. In relevant part, it promises a tax break of 100% for units that that are affordable for people making up to 80% of the Area Median Income (“AMI”) and a tax break of 75% for units that are affordable for people between 80-120% of the AMI. Property owners can access this so long as they designate more than 70 units as “affordable” within these parameters. For a family of four in Miami-Dade County, 80% of the Area Median Income is $90,800 while 120% of the Area Median Income is $136,200 as of April 2024. 

“It’s kind of like what happens with roads . . . . People think ‘I’ll open up the roads and I’m going to get less traffic.’ That has never worked. It will never work because the roads get wider and they get filled up with cars.” 

The problem with this law is that, though it does provide some more affordable units, it is geared mainly towards people closer to the middle-income bracket and creates little affordability for lower income people. The missing housing that is required to meet the demand in Miami is that which would be affordable for people who are at or below 80% of the AMI. However, though the Live Local Act provides some incentives for providing housing to these lower income individuals, developers can still take advantage of tax breaks and zoning preemption even if they do not provide any units affordable for those at or below 80% of the AMI.

 In fact, Florida Housing Finance Corporation’s applicant unit report for 2023 indicates that only four of the 17 properties that applied in Miami-Dade County for tax exemptions under the Live Local Act applied for any units that would be affordable for those at or below 80% of the AMI. This means that in 2023 there were only applications for 254 units in Miami-Dade that would be affordable for people in the lower income bracket. 

According to Annie Lord, the executive director at Miami Homes for All, though the Live Local Act will likely allow some new units to come online “those units will also not do much for that 90,000 gap. It will make it better, but it won’t really get there without additional subsidies.” 

“Those units will also not do much for that 90,000 gap. It will make it better, but it won’t really get there without additional subsidies.”

A housing crisis is a complex and multifaceted problem that can only be resolved with action from multiple angles. Since Miami relies in part on private corporations to add to the housing supply, there is a fine line to walk between pushing them to create affordability while also not making it so prohibitively expensive that they will not build at all. However, it is important to note that a lot of what makes it expensive to build in Miami is often not affordability requirements, but other zoning requirements like parking minimums. These pose a high barrier to entry that makes it so the only people who can profit off development are large scale developers who have little interest in providing affordable housing.

“Those units will also not do much for that 90,000 gap. It will make it better, but it won’t really get there without additional subsidies.”

One way that Miami could remove this barrier to entry would be by eliminating parking minimums for small-scale developers who could provide cheaper housing. Currently, for each bedroom in a building, a developer must provide 1.5 parking spaces. According to Penabad, “you have to provide a large portion of your building for parking and parking is expensive. So, then what happens? You have to basically build bigger buildings which seem to provide more density, but a large part of that building footprint is given over to housing the cars” she says “Maybe 1/3 of the building is given over to housing the cars. The rest of it is given over to housing. Now what happens when you do that? When you do that the cost of the building increases exponentially. So, the number of units that you can afford to make affordable for, lack better word, is further and further limited…We are never going to meet our affordable housing needs if we continue to build this way.”

“We are never going to meet our affordable housing needs if we continue to build this way.”

In 2015 in fact, Miami did pass an ordinance that exempted developers of smaller scale buildings from having to comply with parking minimums in an attempt to entice smaller developers to build more affordable housing. With this ordinance, you suddenly had small scale developers building townhouses and small apartment buildings that were significantly cheaper than most of the other new construction at the time. However, in 2022 Miami’s planning board overturned this ordinance and put a further damper on the construction of smaller scale buildings.

“We are never going to meet our affordable housing needs if we continue to build this way.”

Furthermore, Miami should shift away from its current model of having mainly voluntary inclusionary zoning to incorporating more mandatory inclusionary zoning throughout the city. That is, make it so if developers want to build in the city at all, they need to provide units that are affordable for low-income people. Though critics of these programs argue that if areas mandate affordability, then developers will offset their costs by increasing their prices on market rate apartments or by simply not developing at all, throughout the United States, mandatory inclusionary zoning has been shown to create more affordable units than voluntary programs. Moreover, in Florida, cost offsets are required by law, so any requirement to include affordability would come with accompanying density bonuses, parking exceptions, or subsidies and make it so developers would not be losing as much money in providing affordability.

“Why wouldn’t a developer charge the maximum of that range?”

These affordability requirements should moreover be aimed at people that are lower income. As it stands, policies like the Live Local Act and a number of municipal zoning ordinances in Miami, focus significantly on pushing affordability for people at the middle or “workforce” income bracket. Usually, these policies set a wide range and developers can choose who to make their housing affordable for within that range. But when, like in Miami-Dade County’s Workforce Housing Development Program, the range is from 60-140% of the AMI, housing advocates like Annie Lord fear that it doesn’t do anything to incentivize developers to provide housing at the lower end of that requirement. “Why wouldn’t a developer charge the maximum of that range?” she says. If they are going to make the biggest profit by only incorporating housing that is “affordable” for people at 140% of the AMI, then that is what they are going to do to maximize profits for their shareholders. Providing affordability in a community that you are profiting off should be part of the cost of doing business in Miami.

“Why wouldn’t a developer charge the maximum of that range?”

Moreover, Lord says that what little affordable housing does exist in Miami is rapidly being lost to market forces and to a lesser extent to code enforcement. Solving the affordable housing crisis is not only a matter of creating new affordable housing, but also of preserving that which already exists.

Part of the solution to the rental stock being lost to market forces may be to lift Florida’s restrictions on rent control and allow local communities to implement it where they see fit. In the wake of this housing crisis, Alana Greer says that rent control has become increasingly popular with polls indicating that 80% of Florida voters think that there should be some limit on rental increases and market speculation. 

However, some housing advocates, including Annie Lord, are skeptical of rent control’s ability to help alleviate the affordable housing crisis, citing concerns that incorporating rent control may disincentivize construction ultimately shrinking the housing supply and driving up costs. Indeed, in the wake of Orange County’s rent control ordinance corporate developers threatened to never build in a city that implements rent control. Others fear that in the wake of an impending rent control ordinance, landlords may attempt to quickly raise the rents as much as possible to get ahead of the law.

Ultimately, however the decision of whether to implement rent control is one that should be left up to the voters. Though rent control certainly has positives and negatives, the fact remains that the Florida government has made it impossible for the citizens of Florida to have a say in the matter by preempting it with the Live Local Act. Low-income people and the community at large have been entirely shut out of the room in the interest of serving corporations and their attempts to make a profit off of Florida.

Lord also points out that in recent years, there has been speculation that Miami-Dade County Code Enforcement is being used aggressively to condemn low-income buildings and sell them at a profit to developers who will convert them into market rate housing. For example, in January 2024, a building in the City of Miami was condemned by the county and everyone in it was ordered to evacuate. When the owner of the building got an offer from a potential buyer who asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement, he got suspicious and investigated the company. It turned out that the Mayor of the City of Miami, Francis Suarez sat on the board. Though there were no accusations of ethics violations against the mayor, people felt that was this indicative of a larger pattern of code enforcement being used to condemn buildings that, though they were in a state of disrepair, were not uninhabitable, potentially in the interest of making a profit.

Though the goal of code enforcement is ultimately to ensure that people are not living in unsafe or uninhabitable environments, displacing people is certainly not ensuring their safety. When people are being pushed out of low-income housing, serious consideration must be taken concerning the income of that community and what will be built in its place. There should be more efforts taken to rehabilitate buildings where possible and, when a building does need to be condemned, the units that have been destroyed should be replaced with a comparable number of low-income apartments.

De Paz and his husband ended up finding a new place to live within the limited time frame granted to them. They looked at over 30 houses and moved their family about 15 miles away from the neighborhood where they had originally lived.

“It’s a bit difficult, but, well, it’s the best we could get.”

Their new house is about $900 more a month, has one less bedroom, and has made it so that they now need to commute about an hour each way to drop their kids off at school in the morning. When asked about his housing situation, de Paz says “it’s a bit difficult, but, well, it’s the best we could get.” For now, they are not able to return to the neighborhood that they had lived in for so long.

“It’s a bit difficult, but, well, it’s the best we could get.”

If we are ever to resolve this housing crisis, it will not just be a matter of passing discrete policy, but of changing the way that we think about housing. Housing is not simply an investment mechanism or a way for corporations to turn a profit: It is a human right. As it stands, corporate law prioritizes the ability of corporations to make as much money as possible while offering little protection to community members who rely on the utilities that they provide. But the shareholders of large corporate developers are not the vulnerable people who need to be protected, low-income community members are. Community members deserve to be protected from the greed that will destroy their ability to stay in their communities if it is allowed to flourish. They deserve to be housed.