Palm Beach Post | October 2, 2015
By: Jeff Ostrowski
California and New York are the national bastions of housing unaffordability, but a new study says Florida has the highest share of renters who spend more than half their income on housing.
Fully 30.3 percent of Florida tenants fit that description, compared to 30 percent of Californians and New Yorkers, according to a study by the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.
“It is surprising. You think of San Francisco, New York – those are really expensive places to live,” said Angela Boyd, vice president at Enterprise Community Partners in Washington, D.C. “But Florida is experiencing it more acutely than any place in the nation.”
She blamed a combination of low wages and developers’ focus on luxury rentals rather than affordable units. Among Florida metro areas, South Florida has the highest percentage of renters devoting half their income to rent, at 35.7 percent.
The rental squeeze shows little sign of easing. In Palm Beach County, the average wage fell 2 percent from the first quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same period, Palm Beach County rents jumped 8.5 percent, according to commercial real estate brokerage Marcus & Millichap.
Article last accessed here on October 12, 2015.