You Cannot Solve Housing Affordability Without Building Housing
There is a contradiction at the center of many housing debates in Florida. We agree that housing has become too expensive, that teachers, nurses, police officers, firefighters, young families and other working households are increasingly struggling to live near the communities they serve, and that employers are having a harder time recruiting people who cannot afford to live within a reasonable distance of their jobs. Yet when new housing is proposed, the conversation often changes almost immediately.
The building is too tall. The density is too high. There will be too much traffic. The property should remain commercial. The neighborhood is not the right place. The infrastructure is not ready. The state should not interfere with local land-use decisions. Any one of those concerns can be legitimate, but if every parcel is the wrong parcel, every building is too tall and every increase in density is too much, the housing shortage never changes.
That is part of the reason Florida adopted the Live Local Act.
Live Local did not appear because Tallahassee suddenly became interested in overriding local zoning. It was enacted in 2023 as part of a much broader response to a housing affordability problem that had become increasingly difficult to ignore. The original legislation included substantial funding for affordable housing programs, tax incentives, homeownership assistance and changes intended to make housing easier to build in areas where local land-use rules had previously limited residential development.
One of its most significant provisions was also its most controversial. For qualifying projects, Florida allowed multifamily housing on certain commercial, industrial and mixed-use properties without requiring the traditional political rezoning process. That was a substantial shift in Florida land-use policy, but it was also deliberate. The Legislature was effectively saying that the housing shortage had become serious enough that some regulatory barriers needed to be reconsidered.
Affordability is partly a supply problem
Live Local rests on a fairly straightforward premise: Florida needs more housing. That does not mean housing supply is the only reason homes have become expensive. Land prices, interest rates, insurance, construction costs, property taxes, wages and investor activity all influence what people ultimately pay to rent or own a home.
But housing is not exempt from the basic problem created when demand grows faster than supply. When more people want to live in a region than there are homes available at attainable price points, competition increases for the housing that already exists. The result is familiar throughout South Florida: higher rents, longer commutes, overcrowding and households spending an increasingly large share of their income simply to remain in the region.
That pressure is no longer limited to households traditionally associated with subsidized housing programs. In many Florida communities, people earning solid middle-class incomes still struggle to find housing near their jobs. A teacher married to a firefighter may not think of their family as needing "affordable housing," but they may still find that buying or renting near the community they serve is increasingly difficult.
That distinction matters because Live Local is sometimes criticized for allowing affordability requirements to serve households earning up to moderate-income levels. In a high-cost market, moderate income does not necessarily mean financially comfortable. Workforce housing and affordable housing increasingly overlap, particularly in South Florida.
Live Local does not give developers something for nothing
The land-use benefits receive most of the attention, but qualifying Live Local developments are required to provide something meaningful in return. Under the primary land-use provisions, a substantial portion of the residential units must remain affordable for a long period of time.
That is an important part of the policy bargain. A developer may receive access to residential use, density, height or an administrative approval process that would otherwise be unavailable under local zoning, but the project also accepts long-term affordability restrictions on a significant portion of its units.
People can reasonably disagree about whether Florida has struck that balance correctly. There are fair questions about whether the affordability thresholds are deep enough, whether the incentives are appropriately calibrated and whether some projects would have been built without them.
But describing Live Local simply as a developer giveaway ignores what the developer is required to provide in exchange.
Local control is a legitimate concern
There are also legitimate reasons local governments have pushed back against parts of Live Local. Land-use decisions have traditionally been made locally because cities and counties understand their roads, utilities, development patterns and neighborhoods in ways the state cannot replicate parcel by parcel.
A large multifamily development can create real infrastructure demands. Converting industrial property to residential use can permanently remove land that may be important to a local economy. Height and scale matter near established neighborhoods. Traffic, drainage, schools, water, sewer and public safety capacity matter as well.
Those concerns should not be dismissed as simple resistance to housing. A statewide statute cannot anticipate every unusual property or local condition in Florida, and the Legislature has already amended Live Local several times as practical issues have emerged. That is appropriate. Major land-use policy should be evaluated and refined as its consequences become clearer.
The distinction, however, is between improving the law and using every possible objection as a reason not to build housing.
Local control also has consequences
Local control is often discussed as though the only consequence of a land-use decision occurs within the jurisdiction making it. Housing does not work that way.
A city can decide that a particular residential development is too dense for its community, but it cannot make the people who need housing disappear. Those households live farther away, compete for housing in neighboring jurisdictions or accept longer commutes. Employers have a harder time attracting workers. Transportation costs rise, and traffic generated by long-distance commuting appears somewhere else in the regional system.
Housing markets are regional even when zoning decisions are local.
That creates a difficult but necessary policy question: how much discretion should an individual community have to restrict new housing when the cumulative effect of similar decisions across a region contributes to a broader affordability problem?
There is no simple answer, and state preemption should never be treated casually. But there is also no serious housing strategy that avoids the question entirely.
Supporting affordable housing is easy until there is an address
Most people support affordable and workforce housing in principle. The disagreement usually begins when a specific parcel, building height and number of units appear on an agenda.
Opposing a particular project can be entirely reasonable. Some sites are inappropriate for additional density. Some developments are poorly designed. Some infrastructure systems genuinely cannot accommodate substantial additional intensity without major investment. Certain industrial or employment lands may be strategically important enough to preserve.
But opposition should eventually be accompanied by an alternative.
If a community believes a proposed 300-unit development is inappropriate, where should those 300 units go? If six or eight stories is too tall, what density is acceptable? If commercial properties should not transition to residential use, which properties should? If a community wants teachers, nurses, police officers, restaurant employees, construction workers and younger families to live nearby, how much new housing is it actually willing to accommodate for them?
Those are more difficult questions than simply opposing the application in front of you. They are also closer to the real policy challenge.
More housing does not mean anything goes
Being generally supportive of Live Local does not require supporting every project submitted under it. The law should continue to be reviewed, and its effects should be measured rather than assumed.
Florida should know how many Live Local projects are being proposed, how many are approved, how many actually begin construction and how many ultimately produce occupied housing. Policymakers should know which income levels are being served, whether the required affordable units are materially expanding the housing supply and what happens when commercial or industrial properties transition to residential use.
The same scrutiny should apply to the incentives. If tax benefits, increased density or expedited approvals are being provided, the public should be able to determine whether those incentives are producing housing that otherwise would not have been financially feasible.
That is how the law should improve over time. The objective should not be to protect Live Local from criticism. It should be to determine whether the policy is actually producing additional housing at price points Florida households need.
We eventually have to build something
Florida's housing affordability problem was not created by one zoning ordinance, one city commission, one developer or one legislative decision. It will not be solved by one policy either.
The state needs public investment in deeply affordable housing. It needs private development and preservation of existing affordable units. It needs attainable homeownership, infrastructure investment, better permitting and thoughtful local planning. In many communities, it will also require more density than exists today.
Live Local forces that last conversation in a way traditional housing policy often did not. It asks communities to confront the fact that if we want more people to be able to afford to live in Florida, some places are going to have to accommodate more housing than they currently do.
That does not mean every project belongs everywhere, and it does not mean local governments should stop raising legitimate concerns. It does mean that "not here" cannot become the cumulative housing policy of an entire region.
The debate over Live Local should continue. Local governments should challenge provisions that create real infrastructure, planning or economic problems. Developers should be held to the affordability commitments that justify the benefits they receive. The Legislature should continue correcting unintended consequences as better data becomes available.
But there also needs to be some consistency in the broader conversation. If we believe housing affordability is a serious problem, increasing housing supply has to be part of the solution. And if every proposal to add that supply is unacceptable, then we should at least be candid about the choice we are making.
We are choosing the housing market we already have.