The Florida Realtors supported a plan to spend less money building rental housing. Now they're fighting rent control.
There's an election happening in Orlando that has terrified the state's real-estate lobby.
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One of the most fascinating local elections in Florida this year is happening in Orlando, where voters in Orange County are deciding a referendum on whether to impose one year of rent control in one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country.
It seems destined to be a ceremonial vote. Even if it passes, judges have already ruled that the ordinance probably conflicts with pro-landlord laws passed by the state Legislature.
But even so, the referendum is a chance for voters to send a message about how much bolder they want elected leaders to be when it comes to making sure every Floridian can afford a place to live.
And that terrifies the real-estate lobby.
The Florida Apartment Association, a lobbying group for landlords, and the Florida Realtors, a lobbying group for real-estate agents, have already asked a judge to prevent elections officials from reporting the results of the vote.
The apartment association and its members have also spent more than $200,000 on advertisements opposing the referendum.
The Realtors have spent even more. With help from its national association, the Realtors have spent more than $1.7 million advertising against the rent-control referendum, according to campaign-finance reports — including sending more than half a dozen attack mailers to Orange County homes over just the past two weeks.
The Realtors’ opposition is especially disingenuous. In some of its advertising, the group has blasted rent control as a poor alternative to “real solutions” — like fully funding the state’s affordable housing programs and building more affordable housing units.
But this is the same organization that, just a few months ago, lobbied to take money away from one of those same housing programs — a program that helps build more affordable apartments around the state.
You may have heard about Florida’s new “Hometown Heroes Housing Program,” which Gov. Ron DeSantis has promoted quite a bit in the last few months. It’s a $100 million program that offers home-buying help — in the form of money for down payments and closing costs — to workers in a handful of low-paid-but-important professions, such as teachers, police officers and nurses.
Sounds nice, right? And it is…Except that DeSantis and the Florida Legislature decided to pay for this new home-buying program by taking $100 million out of a different housing program that funds construction of affordable rental apartments.
The Florida Realtors — which loves subsidies that spur more sales commissions for real-estate agents — lobbied hard for the Hometown Heroes program. The association says it “strongly backed” the proposal during this year’s legislative session, even though that meant there would be less money to spend expanding the state’s supply of rental housing.
And yet now it’s also trying to kill an effort to rein in prices for the existing supply of rental housing.
(As an aside, let’s not forget that DeSantis and the Legislature also passed a series of special-interest tax breaks this year that are collectively costing the state more than $25 million annually — including tax breaks for tickets to the Miami Grand Prix and the Daytona 500, a few corporate railroad companies, Florida Power & Light, and a factory salmon farm in South Florida. Maybe they could have skipped the tax breaks instead of cannibalizing one housing program to pay for another?)
In a statement, Margy Grant, the CEO of the Florida Realtors, declined to get into the specifics of the Realtors’ decision to support the Hometown Heroes program at the expense of funding for affordable rental housing. But she insisted that the Realtors have been a “decades-long supporter” of programs to support both homebuyers and renters.
“We are also supporters of meaningful, long-term affordable housing solutions that focus on increasing the availability of both homeownership and rental opportunities,” she said.
Voters now have a chance to see if that’s really true.
Because if they show policymakers that they are angry enough about the status quo to support something as significant as rent control, maybe that’ll spur lobbying groups like the Florida Realtors into more aggressively supporting both renters and homebuyers — rather than allowing the governor and lawmakers to pit one need against the other.
