The state passed a law to build more housing. Now the same local officials who created the shortage are in court trying to kill it.
Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
Florida has a housing shortage. That much is settled. Economists at FSU’s DeVoe L. Moore Center and the Reason Foundation have estimated the statewide gap at more than 100,000 missing rental units. Miami-Dade is short more than 7,000. Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, is missing more than 8,000. Broward is short more than 10,000. More than half of Florida’s renter households are cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their income on housing.
The shortage did not happen overnight. For decades, local zoning rules locked large swaths of Florida into single-family development, imposed height and density limits that made apartment construction impractical, and layered permitting requirements that made the whole process slow and expensive. Local officials made those decisions. Local officials enforced them. And local officials collected the political benefits: a homeowner class whose property values kept rising precisely because supply was constrained.
In 2023, the state legislature decided enough was enough. The Live Local Act was designed to cut through local obstruction and get housing built on underused commercial and industrial land — strip malls, vacant office parks, aging retail corridors — by allowing developers who include affordable units to bypass local zoning and move through approval faster.
The response from local government was immediate. And revealing.
The same officials who created the shortage are now in court fighting the law designed to fix it.
Hillsborough County: Suing the State. This Week.
On March 9, Hillsborough County filed suit against the state of Florida, arguing the Live Local Act is unconstitutional. The commission voted unanimously to bring the challenge.
Commissioner Joshua Wostal, who made the motion, announced the filing on social media. “I have had enough of these greedy multifamily developers,” he wrote, accusing them of “destroying our communities.”
Note what Wostal did not say. He did not say Hillsborough has enough housing. He did not say rents are affordable for the teachers, nurses, and deputies who work in his county. He did not say the shortage his commission helped create over decades of restrictive zoning is someone else’s problem.
He said he’d had enough of developers building apartments.
Hillsborough is not alone. Hollywood and Bal Harbour have filed separate constitutional challenges. Roughly two dozen cities and counties have sued over a related 2025 state growth law. Pasco County commissioners voted unanimously in 2023 to threaten lawsuits against any developer who tried to build apartments under the Live Local Act at all.
What They’re Actually Protecting
Local officials frame their opposition as a defense of community character, neighborhood identity, and home-rule authority. Those are real values. But they are not the whole story.
The whole story is that restrictive zoning benefits the people who already own property in Florida. Scarcity keeps values high. The homeowners who show up to commission meetings and donate to local campaigns have a direct financial interest in keeping supply constrained. And the officials who answer to them have spent years building a regulatory architecture that delivers exactly that result.
The Live Local Act threatens that arrangement. Not because it is radical — it simply allows apartments on land already zoned for commercial use, provided affordable units are included — but because it removes the local veto that has kept supply artificially low for a generation.
That is why they are suing.
The Cost of the Veto
Every lawsuit filed by a Florida county to block the Live Local Act is a choice. A choice to preserve the regulatory veto that has made existing homeowners wealthier while pricing working families out of the communities they serve.
Wostal called the developers “greedy.” That is one way to look at it. Another is to ask who benefits when a county with an 8,000-unit housing deficit goes to court to stop apartments from being built. It is not the sheriff’s deputy paying $2,200 a month in rent. It is not the nurse driving forty minutes each way because she cannot afford to live near the hospital where she works.
The officials filing these suits know exactly what they are protecting. The question is whether the people being priced out are paying attention.