The voices for the authorities in Florida (USA) to act on the lack of affordable housing in a state where the real estate business is in full expansion, especially in order to regulate and control price increases of real estate rentals.
“More and more Florida is becoming unaffordable for Floridians due to these excessive increases in rents,” wrote this Saturday on Twitter the Democratic Representative in Congress of Florida Carlos Guillermo Smith.
Smith wrote a letter to the governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, asking him to declare the state a housing emergency and in response he received from a state spokeswoman a criticism of Joe Biden’s federal government policy against covid-19 and ” confinements ”.
Buying a house or apartment in Florida is something impossible for thousands of families and the only other option, to pay a rent, also, due to the sudden and uncontrolled price increases that many owners apply and the shortage of supply.
According to the organization The Gap, in the United States last year 6.8 million affordable and available rental homes were lacking for renters with very low income, those who are at the poverty line or below, but the problem does not It is exclusive to those homes, especially in cities like Miami and Las Vegas.
On The Gap map, Florida is dark red, with just 28 rental homes per 100,000 extremely low-income people, but Nevada, with 20 homes per 100,000, is the worst of all states. of the same group.
SPECULATION OR FREE MARKET
The others are Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Delaware. Last year the national average was 37 homes per 100,000 very low-income tenants.
Representative Smith denounced that there is “speculation” with the prices of rental housing and recalled that in Florida there are state laws that protect consumers from such abuses. “It is time that we use and apply them,” he stressed.
In his letter to the Republican governor asking for action against speculation with rental prices, Smith included the declaration of a state of emergency that would stop landlord abuses.
In the same vein, the Municipal Board of St. Petersburg, in the metropolitan area of Tampa (west coast of Florida), voted this week to analyze the declaration of the state of emergency in housing in the city to address the problem of unaffordable rents .
If the declaration were approved, it would open the door to a price control and could even freeze rent increases for up to a year.
Only one of six councilors voted against a measure the St. Petersburg tenants union said it supported.
The emergency declaration would allow any annual increase of more than 10% to be declared “speculation”.
Representative Smith considered in his letter that the crisis is due to the combination of low wages that do not reflect the cost of living in this state, cuts in public funds for affordable housing and the limited provision of assistance to pay rent to people who lost their scarce resources at the start of the pandemic.
Last September, according to an S&P Dow Jones index of 20 metropolitan areas in the country, Phoenix, in Arizona, and Tampa and Miami, in Florida, registered the largest year-on-year increases in house prices in that order: 33, 1%, 27.7% and 25.2%, respectively.
“Rent and home prices are rising to an almost unprecedented level and that is creating a crisis,” economist Ken H. Johnson, associate dean of the School of Science, said in a report recently released by Florida Atlantic University. Business.
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