We’re looking at you, Manatee, Brevard, Sarasota, Lake and Volusia
By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
Nobody who showed up to fight a housing development ever carried a sign that said “I oppose plumber jobs.”
But that’s what they support.
In the past 12 months, five Florida counties — Sarasota, Brevard, Manatee, Lake, and Volusia — blocked or effectively killed housing developments totaling 2,469 homes. In each case, the formula was familiar: concerned neighbors, packed commission chambers, petitions, warnings about traffic and flooding and neighborhood character. In each case, the commission obliged.
Red Tape Florida applied the National Association of Home Builders’ Local Economic Impact Model — the industry standard for measuring residential construction’s economic footprint — to each of the five projects. The results should be posted on the wall of every county commission chamber in Florida.
The Jobs Florida Never Created
| County | Project | Homes Blocked | Jobs Never Created | Income Never Generated |
| Manatee | Lennar / Lone Valley, Parrish | 2,047 | 10,490 | $763.8M |
| Brevard | June Park apartments | 186 | 681 | $49.6M |
| Sarasota | D.R. Horton / Celery Fields | 126 | 635 | $46.3M |
| Lake | Crescent Pines, Clermont (KB Home) | 79 | 301 | $21.9M |
| Volusia | Ormond Beach subdivision | 31 | 111 | $8.1M |
| TOTAL | 2,469 | 12,218 | $889.7M |
Twelve thousand jobs. Nearly $900 million dollars in wages and income. Gone — not because of a recession, not because of a hurricane, not because of some market failure. Gone because of petition drives and planning board testimony and commission votes cast to preserve neighborhood character.
The Manatee County figure alone should stop a room. In February 2026, commissioners unanimously denied Lennar Homes’ “Lone Valley” project — 2,047 single-family homes on 683 acres near Buckeye Road in Parrish. The vote is especially notable because the county’s own Planning Commission had already unanimously recommended approval. Professional planners endorsed it. Elected commissioners killed it anyway. The NAHB model puts the economic cost of that single vote at more than 10,000 jobs and $763 million in income. That is not a development project that was denied. That is an economy.
Birds, Flooding, Trees, and Traffic
The stated reasons varied by county. In Sarasota, it was proximity to the Celery Fields — a beloved bird sanctuary adjacent to the proposed D.R. Horton development. The commission rejected the project twice; D.R. Horton has since sued the county. In Ormond Beach, it was flooding concerns in a hurricane-battered Volusia County. In Brevard’s June Park community, 706 petition signatures produced a unanimous Planning and Zoning Board denial before the developer withdrew. In Lake County, commissioners denied the same 79-home Clermont subdivision twice — in November 2025 and again in April 2026 when KB Home returned with a reduced plan. In Manatee County, the Lone Valley project fell to concerns about nearby grocery stores, road capacity, and the pace of growth in a community that is, by all accounts, already growing rapidly.
At an earlier Manatee County commission meeting on a separate but related housing denial, landowner Marilyn Moran — whose family has owned land in the area for over a century — offered the most direct assessment of what was happening: “Your decision today needs to be based on the evidence and the legal principles at issue, not unsupported, emotional pleas or the screeching of anti-development activists.”
The commission voted no anyway.
What the NAHB Model Tells Us
The NAHB Local Economic Impact Model calculates three phases of economic impact from residential construction: the direct effect of construction activity itself, the ripple effect of construction workers spending their wages locally, and the ongoing annual effect of new residents paying property taxes and participating in the local economy.
The jobs lost are not abstractions. They are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, painters, concrete finishers, and the truck drivers, lumber yard workers, hardware store clerks, and restaurant owners who depend on their paychecks. They are the kinds of jobs — blue-collar, trade-based, family-sustaining — that politicians across the spectrum claim to champion.
There is also a second table that rarely gets discussed: the ongoing annual economic loss. Once those homes go unbuilt, thousands of jobs that should exist every year — generated by property tax revenue, resident spending, and local economic participation — also disappear. Permanently.
| County | Homes Blocked | Annual Ongoing Jobs Lost |
| Manatee | 2,047 | 1,837 |
| Brevard | 186 | 119 |
| Sarasota | 126 | 111 |
| Lake | 79 | 53 |
| Volusia | 31 | 19 |
| TOTAL | 2,469 | 2,139 every year |
A Statewide Pattern With a Local Address
These five cases are not outliers. They are the visible tip of a statewide pattern documented repeatedly in Florida housing research. A 2024 report by the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis found that local opposition to development is one of the primary drivers of housing unaffordability.
The data connecting anti-growth sentiment to poverty, stagnant wages, and housing unaffordability is no longer theoretical. It is documented. It is measurable. It has a price — one paid not by the people who show up to commission meetings, but by the people who can never afford to.
Next time someone hands a commissioner a petition against a housing development, someone should hand the commissioner these tables.