News Highlights

3/10/2023The Shimberg Center's new brief, Florida's Affordable Rental Housing Needs: Spring 2023 Update, finds that 825,990 of Florida's low-income renter households pay more than 40% of their income for housing. The brief uses newly available data to update the Center's Rental Market Study, released in Summer 2022. View the update for the most recent data on rental needs of older households, renter participation in Florida's workforce, and county-level cost burden figures.

7/13/2022The Shimberg Center has added new data and applications to the Florida Housing Data Clearinghouse. The Affordability application now includes data on housing cost burden by race and ethnicity, gender/family type, and age of householder. The new Workforce & Employment application includes unemployment rates, employment by industry, and comparisons of housing costs to wages by industry and occupation in Florida communities. The Evictions & Foreclosures application provides monthly counts of eviction and foreclosure filings by county dating back to 2019. For more information, contact us at fhdc-comments@shimberg.ufl.edu.

6/27/2022 The Shimberg Center's 2022 Rental Market Study finds that over 768,000 low-income renters in Florida are paying more than 40 percent of their income for their housing. Of these households, 39 percent are headed by someone age 55 or older-the largest share since the Center began producing the triennial study for Florida Housing Finance Corporation in 2001. The 2022 report also discusses the rental housing needs of homeless individuals and families, farmworkers, fishing workers, and persons with special needs, and outlines preservation risks to Florida's assisted rental housing stock. For more information, contact Anne Ray at aray@ufl.edu.

5/17/2021 The Shimberg Center's Evictions & Foreclosures data application now includes eviction and foreclosure filing counts in Florida county and circuit courts. The evictions data was recently featured in Locked Out, an Orlando Sentinel series on the impacts of COVID-era evictions on Florida renters.

The database tracks evictions and foreclosures filed across the state from January 2019 to December 2020. We plan to update the filing records quarterly. Users can view monthly eviction and foreclosure totals by county, the rate of evictions and foreclosures per 1,000 households, and the change in these figures between 2019 and 2020.

Across Florida counties, eviction filings were actually lower April-July 2020 compared to the previous year, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implemented a statewide moratorium halting the entire process. Filings started to rise in August and September as the moratorium conditions became more narrowly tailored. A COVID-19 specific cause of nonpayment was required, and landlords could still file an eviction, with the final action on hold. In September, the state's moratorium was replaced by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium, which has been extended through June 2021. This moratorium only protects rental eviction and requires that tenants declare a COVID-19 related job or income loss. In most counties, eviction filings ticked up steadily throughout the rest of 2020.

12/16/2020 New research from the Shimberg Center and University of Illinois looks at the role of state policy in promoting healthy living environments in homes funded by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). The researchers studied a wide array of health factors including healthy neighborhood environments, energy efficiency, indoor air quality, noise, green building materials, and more.