A new analysis of census and employment data from the University of Florida's Shimberg Center for Housing Studies (on behalf of Miami Homes for All) has found that renters and frontline workers are the ones most affected by Miami-Dade County's shortage of affordable housing options.
The report updated the 2020 Housing Data Appendix from the Miami-Dade Affordable Housing Framework and shows the impacts of the increase in housing costs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
NBC 6 spoke about the report's key findings with Anne Ray, a researcher at the University of Florida's Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.
"We found that half of households were paying more than they can afford for their housing, housing is usually considered to be affordable if people are paying no more than 30% of their income for their homes," said Ray. "But in Miami-Dade, half of the residents are paying more than that, in fact, 90% of renters making less than $50,000 a year are paying more than they can afford for their housing. So, there's just a big gap between what people can afford to pay and the wages that they make."
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Another of the report's findings was that Black and Latinx households are more likely to be cost-burdened.
Nearly half (48%) of Black and Latinx households are cost-burdened, compared to 38–41% of other households.
According to the study, most of the fastest-growing jobs in Miami-Dade County pay less than $19 per hour and of the 21 occupations expected to add 1,000 or more workers by 2030, 14 have a median hourly wage of $19 or less.
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These jobs include those of medical assistants and home health aides, cooks and waitstaff, housekeepers, and warehouse and delivery staff. This workforce can afford to house units, with monthly costs ranging from $650 to $1,000.
"What we found in this study is that housing really has to focus on people making $75,000 or less, and in many cases $50,000 or less a year. Some of the fastest growing jobs in Miami-Dade include people working in restaurants and people working in health care as home health aides, those are going to create some of the most jobs over the next five to 10 years in the county," said Ray.
"A lot of people want to move to Florida; we have a strong economy. And so, unless we really have a big push to create more affordable homes, that gap is going to continue to grow," said Ray.
When asked if there's a way in which authorities can mitigate this gap or help people overcome this difficult situation, Ray said that Miami-Dade has been really active in building more affordable rental housing, but as the need is so great, the cost went up faster.
"People in Florida and Miami-Dade in particular consistently identify affordable housing as one of their biggest challenges," said Ray. "It's become very much a public issue in a way that I would say it was not when I started working here 20 years ago."
"People recognize that building our affordable housing supply and helping people stay in their homes is necessary for our state to be healthy."
