In Austin, rents are at their cheapest in 20 years. In Florida, local governments are the reason yours aren’t.
By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
Here is a number worth sitting with: 18.3 percent.
That is the share of income the typical Austin, Texas, renter now spends on rent — the lowest on record going back at least 20 years, according to housing analyst Nick Gerli of Reventure App. The typical Austin rent has dropped to $1,565 a month while the median income has climbed to $100,000. Apartment rents are down roughly 22 percent from their 2022 peak.
The reason is simple: Austin built its way out of the problem. Building permits spiked to more than 50,000 units in 2022. That supply has been hitting the market ever since. Developers built. The market responded. Renters won.
Now compare that to Florida, where the median renter spends more than 30 percent of income on housing, and where economists at FSU’s DeVoe L. Moore Center and the Reason Foundation found the state is missing roughly 120,000 rental units. Miami-Dade alone is short more than 7,000 rentals. Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, is missing more than 8,000 units. Broward is short more than 10,000.
The difference between Austin and Florida is not geography or demand. It is local government.
Say it again louder for those in the back: If you are about affordable housing you, by definition, can’t be anti-growth.
The Data Is Unambiguous
Gerli’s analysis of major U.S. metros finds that inventory surplus is the single strongest predictor of where rents are heading. Cities with the biggest supply surpluses — Austin, Tampa, Dallas — are seeing prices fall. Cities with deficits are seeing prices rise. The correlation is -0.80. This is not a complicated relationship.
Florida had the same pandemic-era demand surge Austin did. What Florida does not have is a political culture at the local level willing to let the market build.
What Florida’s Local Governments Actually Did
In December 2023, Pasco County commissioners voted unanimously to sue any developer who tried to build apartments on commercial land under Florida’s Live Local Act — a state law designed specifically to fast-track affordable housing. The county’s concern about losing industrial land to housing has some merit. Threatening builders with litigation does not.
In South Florida, roughly two dozen cities and counties filed lawsuits to block a state law that temporarily froze local restrictions on development. Miami Beach officials warned the Live Local Act would destroy the city’s architectural character. The city’s median home value exceeds $700,000. Workers who serve that community cannot afford to live there.
These are not isolated examples. They reflect a political economy baked into Florida’s local governments: single-family homeowners who dominate local politics have a direct financial interest in housing scarcity. Scarce housing means higher property values. Those homeowners vote. They show up to commission meetings. And local officials, who answer to them, have spent years converting the government’s power over land use into a mechanism for making existing homeowners wealthier at the expense of everyone else.
The Honest Question
If you are a Florida renter wondering why your rent is not falling the way Austin’s is, the answer is not corporate landlords, not inflation, not the insurance market — though all of those make a bad situation worse. The fundamental constraint is the political decision, made in city halls and county commission chambers across this state, to make it difficult, slow, and expensive to build housing near where people want to live.
And those decisions are often enforced by bureaucrats who act as the foot soldiers of anti-growth radicals who would rather see “placemaking” than lower rents for working people.
Austin got out of the way. Its renters are paying 18.3 cents on the dollar. Florida’s local governments have spent years making sure that doesn’t happen here. The question is whether the voters being priced out of their own communities will eventually hold them accountable for it.