{"id":283461,"date":"2026-05-25T09:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/283461\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:31:08","slug":"why-affordable-housing-grows-scarce-even-in-florida-and-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/283461\/","title":{"rendered":"Why affordable housing grows scarce \u2013 even in Florida and the South"},"content":{"rendered":"

Still just in his 20s, Cody Eades is a grizzled veteran of the American housing market.<\/p>\n

After he and his wife split up in 2019, the couple sold a home they had purchased in Orlando. They made a small profit. Mr. Eades left town in an RV with a dog and his part of the earnings, working remotely and following the open road.<\/p>\n

\u201cProblem was,\u201d he says, \u201cI had no home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why We Wrote This<\/p>\n

Finding a reasonably priced home used to be easy in the South. But soaring home prices have far outpaced wage growth, creating a housing squeeze.<\/p>\n

He had figured he could always buy a new home when he decided to return to the Sunshine State. After all, the South has long been the nation\u2019s epicenter of affordable housing.<\/p>\n

He was wrong.<\/p>\n

For Mr. Eades and millions like him, Florida\u2019s low home prices long represented a shot at the middle class. But a boom in population has helped push prices dramatically upward, while median household incomes have stagnated.<\/p>\n

Today, the average first-time homebuyer in Florida is 40 years old, up from under age 30 two decades ago. Housing affordability \u201cis a defining challenge for our economy right now, particularly in the South,\u201d says Joey Von Nessen, a research economist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.<\/p>\n

\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\/<\/p>\n

\t\t\tPatrik Jonsson\/The Christian Science Monitor\n<\/p>\n

Jacksonville resident Cody Eades laments how difficult it has become to find affordable homes in safe neighborhoods in Florida.<\/p>\n

Although Florida is a complicated case \u2013 with slowing in-migration, rising insurance rates, new laws that have increased homeowners association fees, and a recent drop in median home prices \u2013 the market is still too expensive for many potential buyers.<\/p>\n

\u201cBuyers right now are terrified,\u201d says Jon Brooks, a millennial real estate analyst in Jacksonville.<\/p>\n

Drive until you can afford a mortgage<\/p>\n

Nationally, even as demand has remained high, housing starts \u2013 the industry term for the beginning point of new construction \u2013 have slowed, a trend that started right after the Great Recession of 2008. Residential permitting dropped by more than 20% between 2021 and 2022, even without a recession. In South Carolina, housing starts after 2008 dropped to 3% from 5% even as the state added 650,000 people between 2010 and 2020. Qualifying income for a new house has doubled since 2019 and is now over $100,000 a year, according to CRBE, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm.<\/p>\n

Along the Jacksonville beaches, young couples still shop for homes and snap up nice digs. But many have wealthy parents who cover down payments, say real estate agents, so these young house hunters don\u2019t tend to worry much about buying at peak prices or job insecurity. The problem is, \u201c90% of people don\u2019t have rich parents,\u201d says Mr. Brooks.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also true 300 miles to the north, in Hall County, Georgia, near the sprawling chicken processing plants of Gainesville. There are hundreds of homes on the market. What\u2019s missing are homes that new buyers can afford, says Gregg Poole, a Hall County commissioner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest problem facing our children is that they\u2019re not able to have the hope and dreams of my generation or the generations before me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The mismatch is in part a market failure, but also a failure of American imagination and policy, experts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t abandon entry-level homes and expect to have a workforce and be competitive in a global marketplace. People have to have a place to live and start a family,\u201d says Jeff Brandes, director of the Florida Policy Project in St. Petersburg. \u201cCompanies tend to forget the bottom of the market. And what we\u2019re seeing now is kind of a story about what happens when you do: You ultimately find there is no market.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trend is causing shifts in how younger Americans think about wealth creation, says Mr. Brooks, who has two young children. \u201cFor a lot of young people it\u2019s become a payment economy,\u201d he says. \u201cInstead of paying $2,500 for a mortgage, we pay $1,600 for an apartment and then invest the rest in the stock market.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Florida\u2019s in-migration slows, South Carolina has become the nation\u2019s fastest-growing state. But it also has housing problems. Of the state\u2019s 47 counties, just 12, mostly nestled along the coast, have driven the growth. Housing affordability \u201cis not a short-term fix,\u201d says Professor Van Nessen. \u201cAnd affordability can vary greatly depending on the market you\u2019re looking at,\u201d he says, noting the growth of homes in rural Ocala, Florida. \u201cYou drive until you can afford a mortgage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Homes finally getting smaller<\/p>\n

Nationally, the White House has pushed the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and at one point floated the idea of 50-year mortgages. States such as California and Massachusetts are working to increase urban density \u2013 often to howls of protest from neighborhoods worried about dings to property values.<\/p>\n

But there are signs of a market shifting toward starter home sizes as the number of households with children under age 18 has been shrinking since 1980. Square footage for new construction peaked in 2016 at 2,700 square feet and has now eased down to 2,400 square feet. That\u2019s still larger than the average starter home, at 1,800 square feet.<\/p>\n

So far, most reforms have come at the local level. Charleston, South Carolina, has embarked on a bid to build 3,500 affordable homes over the next decade. In Tampa, Florida, a local law called \u201cYes in God\u2019s Backyard\u201d now allows nonprofit churches to develop land. Atlanta has eased rules on \u201caccessory dwellings\u201d to ease the housing crunch.<\/p>\n

While those efforts are important, some of the housing problem stems from national factors, including the way things like tariffs and labor shortages affect construction costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are so many things going on that are from the national picture that impacts locally, and you can see that,\u201d says veteran Jacksonville real estate agent Janie Boyd.<\/p>\n

Ms. Boyd also points to unrealistic home-buyer expectations as an issue. Part of homeownership, after all, she says, is accepting some risk to join a community and work to make it better to everybody\u2019s benefit. As an example, she cites the quietly gentrifying Murray Hill neighborhood, one of Jacksonville\u2019s oldest, which offers hipster eateries, jazz circles, and even a beekeeper store. Median home prices hover around $240,000.<\/p>\n

But many of the homes are older and in need of repair. And petty crime rates in the area worry some. One factor keeping prices down are local complaints about whiffs from a perfume factory nearby. Racial and socioeconomic issues also come into play, adds Mr. Brooks. \u201cPeople don\u2019t want to live next to poor people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\/<\/p>\n

\t\t\tPatrik Jonsson\/The Christian Science Monitor\n<\/p>\n

Construction worker Tony Suits sits on the porch of his house in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida, May 7, 2026.<\/p>\n

Such realities are part of a trade-off for Tony Suits, a 50-something construction worker who now owns the Murray Hill home where he grew up.<\/p>\n

He has raised three sons in the house, and now he worries whether they\u2019ll have their own place before they reach his age.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re going to be playing catch-up for a long time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As for Mr. Eades, he has put his home dreams on ice for now. He rents in one of the increasingly popular mother-in-law apartments in a neighborhood where he says he could never afford to buy a home.<\/p>\n

Homeownership \u201cis starting to feel far out of reach,\u201d he says. Mr. Eades, who manages a pizza shop, says he is pining for his native Louisiana. \u201cI\u2019m ready to give up on Florida,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m thinking about going home.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Still just in his 20s, Cody Eades is a grizzled veteran of the American housing market. After he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-283461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}