Jeff Brandes: Florida’s broken housing ladder

In Tampa, a young professional earning a solid income, doing everything right, scrolls through online home listings on a Sunday night. A few years ago, they would have been a first-time buyer.

Today, they are still renting. Not by choice, but out of necessity.

This is the quiet shift happening across Florida.

At the recent Florida Policy Project Housing Solutions Summit, the takeaway wasn’t that the housing market is broken. It is working exactly as structured, just not for the people it once served. At the top of the market, luxury housing continues to move, supported by cash buyers and out-of-state wealth.

Beneath that, the middle is thinning. Sellers are now outnumbering buyers. Prices are adjusting. And buyers are being squeezed by mortgage rates, insurance, and taxes.

But at the bottom, something more fundamental has happened. The starting point into homeownership has largely disappeared. Florida didn’t run out of demand. It ran out of entry points.

In 2019, a typical Florida home cost about $250,000. Today, it is closer to $400,000. Wages didn’t double. Housing costs nearly did. The ladder didn’t just get taller. It got steeper.

For decades, housing in America functioned like a ladder. You didn’t start at the top. You started on the first rung, then the next, then the next.

That steady climb was how families built stability and wealth.

In Florida today, we haven’t just weakened that ladder. We have removed the first three rungs. The data makes this unmistakable. Florida has roughly 4.9 million renter-age residents in 2025, projected to grow to 5.0 million by 2030, an increase of about 90,000. But this isn’t simply population growth. It is a system where renters are increasingly unable to become owners.

Nationally, rentals now comprise 75% of net household growth, with about 860,000 new renter households compared to 300,000 new owner households year over year. This is the warning sign. When a housing system produces far more renters than owners, it is not expanding opportunity. It is constraining it. The consequences are already showing up.

In parts of Tampa Bay, nearly 30% of renters are spending more than half their income on housing, making it nearly impossible to save for a down payment. Across the state, rising housing costs, insurance, and taxes are pushing working- and middle-class residents to the edge.

That bottleneck shows up everywhere.

First-time buyers now make up less than a quarter of all home purchases, and the median age of a first-time buyer has climbed to 40. An additional 900,000 Americans ages 25 to 34 are living with their parents compared to just a year earlier.

This is not a delay. It is a stall.

When the first rungs disappear, people don’t stop climbing. They just start farther away. In Florida, that often means “drive till you qualify,” with families pushed farther from job centers in search of affordability. Businesses struggle to find workers. Commutes stretch. Infrastructure strains. The connection between where people work and where they can afford to live begins to break down.

And when even that stops working, people make a different calculation. They leave. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, rising housing costs are now pushing Floridians out of the state, reversing the very migration boom that built its modern economy.

Florida’s migration story is already shifting.

Domestic household net migration fell sharply from 105k in 2021 to 56,015 in 2022, then dropped further to 15k in 2023, turned negative in 2024, and rebounded only slightly in 2025. This is not a blip. It is a signal. What was once Florida’s greatest strength, its ability to attract and retain workers, is quietly becoming its biggest risk.

The solution is not complicated, but it is urgent. If the system produced this outcome, the system must change. That starts with rebuilding the missing rungs by legalizing and scaling the kinds of housing we’ve regulated out of existence, such as smaller lots, duplexes, townhomes, and accessory dwelling units. It means embracing upzoning near jobs and transit so more homes can be built where people work. It means reducing parking mandates and expediting permitting so that time and regulations do not function as hidden taxes on affordability.

In short, it means making it possible, again, to build entry-level housing.

Because housing isn’t just about supply. It is about mobility. And a state that removes the first three rungs of the housing ladder shouldn’t be surprised when the next generation doesn’t just stop climbing … They build their future somewhere else.

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Jeff Brandes is the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project and a former Florida state Senator. He has been a leading voice on housing affordability, mobility, and criminal justice reform in Florida.