‘Homes for people’ is a worthwhile policy goal

President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis have trained their sights on the same culprits driving up housing costs: Wall Street banks, hedge funds, and large investors.

Both the President and the Governor are taking important steps to level the playing field for working families looking to purchase homes and settle into neighborhoods. One important reality inherent to these policy conversations is that many of the homes in our state are being snapped up by investors and converted from traditional residential housing to investor-owned short-term rentals, taking housing stock off the market.

Policymakers have many tools available to combat the proliferation of investor rentals in residential areas. But they need to follow the President and the Governor’s lead and do more.

Trump, in typical fashion, gets right to the point: “We want homes for people, not for corporations.” The President wants to “stop Wall Street from treating America’s neighborhoods like a trading floor” and “promote sales to individual owner-occupants.”

DeSantis, for his part, wants to make homes more affordable for owner-occupants as well. He wants to shift the property tax burden from homesteaded properties to investment homes, or “Airbnbs,” and, in so doing, lower the carrying costs for residents. This is a shared priority of the Governor and legislative leadership and is likely to be the signature policy accomplishment of DeSantis’ final year in office.

Underlying the concerns of both Republican leaders is the economic reality that the commercialization of residential housing stock, which has accelerated since the Great Recession, is pushing home ownership out of reach for many working families. In fact, the share of Americans owning a home has not risen in five years.

Reflecting this broader trend in housing, platforms like Airbnb, which once featured granny flats, are now dominated by large-scale commercial operators. Further, institutional investors (focused on both short- and long-term rentals) are buying up entire neighborhoods in Florida.

Republican State Rep. Berny Jacques was a year ahead of the President by filing state-level legislation that would “empower local governments to designate land exclusively for single-family homeownership, preventing predatory investment firms from monopolizing residential areas.”

Trump seems to have keyed into Jacques’ concerns. In his words, “neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests.”

Corporate-owned long-term rentals, which price working families out of ownership, are a concern, but at least in that instance, families can still settle into neighborhoods. Corporate-owned short-term rentals take residential housing stock out of the long-term rental market, reduce overall supply, and bring a host of other disruptive land-use issues (trash, parking, off-hours activity, etc.) to communities.

This is especially true in many Florida beach communities, where residents have been pushed out and routinely outbid by investors who may never step foot on the property. Not only are working families displaced, but the remaining nearby families must contend with absentee landlords and rowdy Spring Breakers.

The Florida Legislature should support Trump and DeSantis’ efforts to help working families achieve a core tenet of the American Dream: homeownership. However, it should go further and empower local governments to manage rental districts (whether long-term or short-term) responsibly.

Florida’s teachers, first responders, military personnel, and seniors (to name a few) are at risk of being pushed out of their own communities if we don’t act.

___

Franklin Coley is the president of the Alliance for Stronger Communities.