Scott Maxwell often highlights a statistic that should stop Central Floridians in their tracks: among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Orlando ranks 49th in median annual wages.
As I thought about Orlando’s wage ranking, part of our economic story kept nagging at me: housing. In truth, I have felt this disconnect developing for more than a decade.
I have worked as a residential interior designer for nearly 30 years, with experience in many major cities. That does not make me an economist, but it has given me another perspective on the housing economy: I see it from inside the house.
Interior designers often enter the financial conversation after the purchase is complete. The mortgage has been calculated, insurance and taxes considered, and closing costs absorbed. What remains is the money a household actually has available to turn that house into a home.
Over the years, I have watched that equation change dramatically in Central Florida. A client can afford to purchase an increasingly expensive home yet have surprisingly little left to furnish or improve it. The sofa gets postponed. The draperies wait another year. A renovation gets divided into phases.
Those circumstances are obviously very different from a family struggling to pay rent, and I would never equate the two. But they reveal something important: When the effects of rising housing costs are noticeable even among households financially comfortable enough to hire an interior designer, it says something about how far the affordability squeeze has traveled up the economic ladder.
Having worked in several of America’s most expensive markets, I find Central Florida particularly revealing. New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami certainly have expensive housing. But those markets also have wage structures and concentrations of wealth that can support very different levels of discretionary spending.
Central Florida increasingly feels different. Housing prices and expenses have risen dramatically without a comparable rise in what many households earn.
I grew up in Orlando, and that was not always the bargain. For decades, Central Florida offered something valuable in exchange for comparatively modest wages: affordability. You might earn less here than in New York or Washington, but your home and much of daily life cost less, too. That bargain is breaking down.
The irony is difficult to ignore. Orlando sits near the bottom among major metropolitan areas in wages while simultaneously facing one of the nation’s most serious shortages of affordable housing for its lowest-income residents. The statistics measure different things, but together they point toward a problem that many Central Floridians already understand instinctively: what people earn here and what it costs to live here have become badly disconnected.
That disconnect does not live only in spreadsheets. It lives in the teacher wondering how far from school she must live to find rent she can afford. It is the hospitality worker deciding whether another rent increase means taking on a roommate. It is the young couple wondering whether homeownership will ever move from aspiration to reality.
And, at a far more comfortable end of the economic spectrum, I see another version of it when a design client purchases an expensive Central Florida home and discovers how little remains to furnish and improve it. The consequences are not equal. But the underlying pressure comes from the same mismatch.
Tourism has brought Orlando extraordinary prosperity, employment and an international identity few American cities could replicate. The point is not to diminish that success. It is to ask how broadly that success is being shared.
A thriving community cannot measure prosperity solely by the number of visitors arriving, subdivisions being built, property values rising or people moving here.
Eventually, prosperity has to reach the household budget.
A house can be an investment, a tax base, a real-estate transaction or an economic statistic. But to the person living inside it, it is something much simpler. It is home.
Orlando has spent decades successfully becoming a world-class destination. Perhaps our next ambition should be just as important: becoming a world-class place to live for the people who make this region work.
Scott Maxwell’s wage numbers tell one part of that story. Our housing reality tells the other.
The people who make Orlando successful are increasingly being asked to build their lives on wages that no longer match the cost of calling Orlando home.
Dan Bray is a Central Florida residential interior designer with nearly 30 years of experience.