A historic housing win is hanging by a thread
Record spending by real estate interests may scuttle a true breakthrough for renters
Welcome to a Friday evening edition of Progress Report.
We were all set to run a story on affordable housing and the upcoming election last night, but a late-breaking judicial decision required our reporter, McKenna Schueller, to do some additional reporting, rewrites, and reconfiguring. It was odd timing, but I suppose it shows that we’ve got our finger on the pulse.
Now, the story is both a look at the progress being won for working people as well as the vast institutional hurdles that make it so hard to pass even overwhelmingly popular changes through democratic means.
With the midterm elections just a little more than on week away, keep your eye out for our coming stories on voting rights, ballot initiatives, activism, major races, and unsparing analysis.
by McKenna Schueler
Earlier this year, Orlando-area commissioners made Orange County the first municipality in Florida to put rent stabilization on the ballot. The 4-3 vote was a historic moment, and marked what seemed then as the high point in a sustained effort by progressives to push for more affordable housing in a state where rental units and home prices continue to soar.
But the ballot measure is now at risk of failing, not due to public disapproval, but instead a last-minute intervention of partisan judges. On Thursday night, the Florida Appellate Court sided with landlord and real estate lobbyists in a legal challenge to prevent voters from having their say on the rent stabilization measure.
The decision is the latest escalation in a lawsuit brought by Central Florida’s landlords, Florida Realtors and Florida Apartment Association, shortly after the county commission approved the language of the ordinance. Remarkably, the lobbyist groups claimed that the county hadn’t provided sufficient evidence of a “grave emergency,” as required under Florida law.
This despite the fact that rents in Orange County skyrocketed 25% from 2020 to 2021, while the median existing home sales price rose 43%. The county is also more than 25,000 housing units shy of where it should be, meaning that prices are unlikely to stop increasing.
The lawsuit was originally rejected by a Circuit Court judge, but the 2–1 ruling by the appellate court complicates things. At least the partisan breakdown was predictable, as the two judges that ruled against the ordinance were appointed by Republican Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, with the lone dissent coming from a judge appointed to the court by former Gov. Charlie Crist. Now the Democratic nominee for governor, he was back then the sort of moderate, reform-minded Republican that no longer really exists.
Going Deeper
What does this ruling mean? At the very least, one of the DeSantis appointees who wrote the opinion concludes that they “anticipate” that the results of the ballot initiative won’t be certified. But as investigative journalist Jason Garcia points out, lobbyists may try to prevent the votes from even being counted.
“In the “free” state of Florida, corporations get to decide what you can and cannot vote for,” tweeted Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando-area Democrat, in response to the ruling. “They’ve already spent so much money to oppose this rent stabilization ordinance — it’s wild how far they’ll go to keep raising rates on everyday people.”
Orange County’s historic rent stabilization proposal has been hard-fought, and should advocates find a way to get the measure authorized, it won’t help nearly enough people due to limitations that eventually made it into the ordinance’s language.
But what it would do is set a precedent, establishing that tenants can rise up against some of the most dominant economic forces in society and take back even a modicum of power.
The ballot measure — a subject of fierce debate among landlords, local government leaders, and your everyday renters — would effectively implement a 9.8% cap on rent increases for potentially 104,000 of the estimated 230,000 multifamily residential rental units in Orange County, per The Orlando Sentinel.
Under Florida law, the measure must be put up for a vote by the residents of the county, and it would only last for one year. As Emily Bonilla, the Orange County commissioner who championed the rent stabilization effort, explained, it would be a stopgap measure at best, intended to “stop the bleeding” of the area’s housing crisis as other short-term (and ideally, long-term) solutions are developed.
If approved and certified, the ordinance would ostensibly go into effect Nov. 21, though that’s now entirely up in the air. Add it to the uncertainty being felt by working people across the region.
As the Crist-appointed judge pointed out in his dissent, many households are struggling to make ends meet in a county where “a significant portion” of the population is employed in low-wage jobs in the tourism industry. Arguably, that’s been a problem for some time, but especially so in the last two years.
Tiara Moton, a Disney worker and member of UNITE HERE Local 737, laid out the wrenching choices being foisted on the region’s low-income workers at an event in August.
“I’m in a situation of trying to figure out how I’m going to come up with my rent, I had to sacrifice some of my rent money in order to pay my light bill because my lights got turned off,” Moton said. “I was sitting in the house for two, three days with my two-year-old child with no electricity.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough for landlords. A brand new political action committee dubbed Floridians for Housing Opportunity, funded in part by the landlord trade groups, also launched an anti-rent control attack ad campaign railing against the measure.
"Rent control is a failed policy that we've seen across the nation in some of the most high cost-of-living cities in our country," Dana Luncan, a spokesperson for the PAC, told Fox News 35.
According to campaign documents filed with the state Division of Elections office, the PAC’s sole intent is to oppose the Orange County rent stabilization measure. The PAC’s listed treasurer, Nancy Watkins, is a Tampa-based accountant and veteran campaign treasurer for “hundreds of local and national Republicans,” according to Florida Politics, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
A listed chairperson of the PAC, aptly described by More Perfect Union as a “developer front group,” is a past president of the Florida Apartment Association. The PAC’s registered agent, Richard Coates, was recently named one of Florida Politics’ most influential people in Florida politics and reportedly controls “millions to influence elections” statewide.
So, the landlord class has a fighting force behind this aggressive campaign to not only knock rent stabilization off the ballot, but to amplify fear-mongering about the policy weeks before Election Day. At least $625,000 has been dumped into several different PACs aimed at killing rent control.
Not only is a limited cap on rent hikes on the line — so, too, is any semblance of democracy. That is, letting the people decide on this measure, not the interests desperate to protect their right to price-gouge in the “least affordable place to live in the U.S.”
Florida Rep. Carlos Guillermo-Smith (D-Orlando), a staunch advocate for housing issues and workers’ rights in the Orlando area, blasted the industry’s ad campaign on Twitter.
For the record, Florida Democrats have unsuccessfully attempted to nix Florida’s preemption laws that make the implementation of rent caps by local governments a headache. In April, a group of over two dozen Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. DeSantis, pleading with him to declare a housing state of emergenc, and to expand a special legislative session on property insurance to address other housing issues, including unaffordable rents and price-gouging.
But with a Republican trifecta — a Republican Governor, and Republican majorities in the House and Senate that are likely to stick — the legislation was and likely will remain dead in the water.
Meanwhile, Orange County has seen a staggering spike in eviction filings, home values are up, housing inventory is low, and the area is still grappling with the social and economic ramifications of Hurricane Ian, which has only exacerbated the existing housing crunch in Central Florida.
Sheena Rolle, Senior Director of Strategy for Florida Rising told Progress Report that the social and civil rights organization had been running a coordinated canvassing campaign that sent organizers into neighborhoods, churches, and local government meetings, among other places.
Rolle contends that nearly everyone they’ve talked to in Orange County neighborhoods about the rent stabilization measure has been supportive of the idea. “Even grassroots landlords out in the community understand the importance of it,” Rolle said.
Only the “organized lobbyists” with trade groups like FAA and Florida Realtors, she explained, have been saying it’s a bad idea. Not that their talking points have convinced anyone other than the judges.
“None of their messaging matters when someone is being put out on the street, they're trying to figure out what kind of non-traditional housing they can find immediately, and where to house their children,” Rolle said.
It should be said that rent control would not be a panacea. There are legitimate concerns about it as a policy solution, largely due to state policy designed to favor the real estate industry.
In Florida, due to limitations imposed by state preemption, it’s designed to be a time-limited, emergency measure. It’s not a long-term solution. Local leaders — and perhaps more tellingly, the legal teams advising them — often warn that rent control could become the subject of costly litigation, should opponents file additional lawsuits in protest. Plus, as some electeds in other parts of Florida have pointed out prior to voting against rent control, there is a chance landlords would hike up rents just before the cap goes into effect, or double their spike a year later.
Rent control doesn’t address the national housing shortage. It doesn’t raise wages for workers who can no longer afford to live where they work. But does that mean it’s not worth pursuing?
We’ll see how the legal challenges pan out — and, hopefully, what the voters have to say.
The Battleground: Other Housing Policy Fights Statewide
As a treat, Progress Report has compiled a brief overview of the status of other housing policy battles across Florida, including some previously covered by Progress Report.
St. Petersburg: A guaranteed right to counsel program for tenants facing eviction (and potentially other tenant-landlord disputes) is still in play. If implemented, this could make St. Petersburg the first city in Florida to have a program that would guarantee legal representation for tenants at risk for eviction — who are disproportionately low-income, people of color, and exceptionally less likely to have access to legal representation compared to landlords.
The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Pinellas DSA, has also launched a campaign advocating for social housing in the city, with the support of St. Petersburg city council member Richie Floyd. Floyd is himself a Pinellas DSA member, and Florida’s first (and only) open socialist elected to office in a century.
The campaign, advocating for publicly-owned, mixed-income housing that’s permanently affordable, has drawn some interest from the mayor, who has named housing a “top priority” of his administration — despite opposing city leaders’ latest proposal for rent stabilization (which failed to get majority approval of the full city council, despite many impassioned pleas from residents). He used “increased cost of litigation” as an excuse for his opposition.
Tampa: The fight for rent control in Tampa, which neighbors St. Petersburg, has also come up short thus far, though Robin Lockett, a regional organizer for Florida Rising in Tampa, assured Progress Report back in August that the “David versus Goliath” fight wasn’t over. After all, it isn’t as if they haven’t won some significant victories this year — this spring, activists successfully advocated for a tenants bill of rights, which provides protections to tenants dealing with bad landlords or facing evictions.
The city, led by a former police chief who has warned rent control would “kill development,” has also moved to expand available assistance for tenants: A housing assistance hotline, a pilot program (likely means-tested) for housing-related legal counsel, and $6 million of additional funding (on top of $5 million allocated earlier this year) for a rental and move-in assistance program. Most recently, city leaders are also exploring changes in zoning laws to allow for more Accessory Dwelling Units (aka “granny flats,” tiny homes, etc).
Miami: Miami is Florida’s ground zero for exorbitant rent spikes. But, like in other major Florida cities, it’s also the site of efforts by activists to organize for basic tenant protections, including right to counsel (ongoing), rent control (also ongoing), and a tenants’ bill of rights (approved by Miami-Dade County leaders) that offer additional legal protections for renters.
In April, Miami-Dade’s mayor, who reportedly opposes rent control, declared a state of emergency over housing affordability, and recently announced a new ‘HOMES’ plan ostensibly meant to provide “both immediate relief and create long-term solutions” to the tune of $85 million in investment. Miami Beach will also be considering a universal rent application fee program, according to city documents, to help reduce renters’ cost burden.
Gainesville: Earlier this month, Gainesville became the first Florida city to vote out exclusionary zoning in a split 4–3 vote (what is it with these 4 to 3 votes?) This vote will effectively eliminate single-family zoning throughout the city and allow for limited multi-family homes in existing single-family neighborhoods.
According to the Gainesville Sun, this comes after months of controversy, debate, and opposition voiced by a state agency, and some homeowners. Exclusionary zoning has Jim Crow roots, and the push for zoning changes in the city was more than four years in the making.
Jacksonville: A number of advocacy groups in Jacksonville (some affiliated with national or statewide organizations) are pushing for a Tenants Bill of Rights — similar to those secured in places like Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Pinellas County.
Florida Rising and the Jacksonville Community Action Committee — a grassroots, Black-led organization that’s loosely affiliated with other chapters in the state — is also advocating for an Office of Tenant Advocacy, which is already in the works in Miami and Tampa.
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Retirees looking for warmer climates & lower taxes can no longer find reasonable housing in Florida. It's not only a working class problem-