ORLANDO, Fla. — Orlando’s rent prices are continuing to head toward the moon, with the average renter of a one-bedroom apartment now ponying up almost $500 more per month than they would have at the beginning of the year.
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According to data collected by an array of websites and firms that track housing prices, including sites like RentCafe and Zumper, the average one-bedroom apartment in Orlando cost approximately $1,200 per month in January. Fast forward to the beginning of November, and an average unit prices out around $1,700 per month.
READ: Inside the collapse of Zillow: hundreds of homes to hit Orlando market
That’s a 40% increase caused by a severe shortage of available housing, pinching workers in a year where the price of everything else has become more expensive.
“Incomes have not increased [by that much],” Austin Valle, one of the leaders of Orlando YIMBY, said. “Boom, we’re out of whack, right rent is rising more than income, which means that people are going to be able to afford it less.”
Every single-family home near downtown that’s not a fourplex is:
— Orlando YIMBY (@OrlandoYIMBY) November 9, 2021
🚗💨 Three people who have to commute into the city
🌳🪓 Three homes that have to be built on untouched land
🚫👨👨👧👦 Three families who can’t live in our great city
It’s time to end exclusionary zoning.
Orlando YIMBY is a volunteer-based organization that advocates for housing policies that make living affordable. As the name suggests, the group was formed to counteract the people who almost always show up to oppose developments near their properties, commonly referred to as NIMBYs.
“One thousand people were moving here weekly to the greater Orlando area,” Valle surmised. “We are not building 1,000 units a week.”
While housing prices have taken a breather, there are no signs that rent prices will do anything but continue to go up. Apartment prices last increased in 2017 and stayed relatively flat until the beginning of the pandemic, statistics show.
READ: Zillow to sell off hundreds of Orlando homes after homebuying division crumbles
Still, Orlando is one of the most expensive cities to live in when you compare income devoted to paying rent. Analysts say the area’s renters send 36 cents of every dollar to their landlord.
Valle’s group is in the process of putting a proposal together for city and county leaders to help give developers a longer – but controlled – leash, and eventually bring rent growth in line with inflation in the rapidly expanding city.
Their focus, he said, will partially be on encouraging denser housing development in neighborhoods close to downtown Orlando or near major transit lines. That could be through ideas being entertained by cities nationwide like reducing minimum lot sizes and setbacks, minimum parking requirements or eliminating zoning that mandates single family housing.
“What we need to do is introduce what we call gentle density into these neighborhoods and start to introduce things like more duplexes and fourplexes,” he said.
Orlando city leaders gave the group a small victory this week by pressing on with the planned RoseArts development in the Rosemont community. Plans call for 5,600 apartments to be built on a former golf course. 560 of them will be designated as affordable housing.
Neighbors have opposed the project for years and asked commissioners to restrict development to single family homes. Valle said the denser development will keep cars off highways and undeveloped land from being clear-cut, for now.
“Building 5,600 units did not create 5,600 people,” he pointed out. “Those people exist. The question is, where are they going?”
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Cox Media Group
