Inside Jacksonville’s Housing Crisis with Dr. David Jaffee and Katie Renzi

[00:00:01] Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike Mike's on Mic, a conversation about politics, government, and Jacksonville, with 50-year opinion leaders Mike Hightower, Mike Tolbert, and award-winning broadcaster and longtime political observer, Mike Miller. Welcome to another episode of Mike's on Mic. I'm Mike Miller. Mike Tolbert is with us from his farm, but Mike Hightower is unable to join us today, so we're going to just press on regardless, and we wish him well.

[00:00:28] Today we're going to be asking some simple but yet uncomfortable questions. While many Jacksonville residents can't afford rent, what is blocking them from home ownership? Why do working families increasingly find themselves one rent increase away from financial distress? And this is a big question. Who benefits from a housing market where homes have become investment vehicles instead of places to live?

[00:00:55] Jacksonville has experienced dramatic changes in its housing market. Investor ownership has grown. Corporate landlords have become major players. Rents have climbed faster than wages. There is little housing, and there's too much speculation on both. Today we're going to examine how we got here, who's responsible, and what can be done before home ownership becomes permanently out of reach for a generation of Jacksonville residents.

[00:01:20] David Jaffe is a sociology professor at the University of North Florida whose work is focused on globalization, labor, neoliberalism, financialization, and social consequences of economic systems. Katie Renzi is project manager for UNF's Rental Housing Project, and together they co-authored a book called The Financialization of Human Shelter, the Rental Housing Crisis in a Sunbelt City, which is based on extensive research into Jacksonville's rental market.

[00:01:50] And David and Katie, welcome to Mike's on Mike. It's great to have you with us. And before Mr. Tolbert asks the first question as we normally do, David, if you would summarize for us what the study shows. The study was essentially instigated by the sharp increase in monthly rent that took place in 2021-2022.

[00:02:10] And we're talking about within a year or two, people experiencing an increase of, on average, about $400 a month in their monthly rent or 30 to 40% increase. So for that reason, I launched the Jacksonville Rental Housing Project as a community-based, what I call public sociology project. And we were trying to get at what was going on and what the explanation was.

[00:02:36] So I can probably turn to the title of the book, which is The Financialization of Human Shelter, which kind of lays out a key thesis. The Financialization of Human Shelter is a concept around which the project is organized. And we arrived at that from doing a lot of research. But when we talk about the financialization of human shelter, we're using the term human shelter deliberately because we want to highlight the fact that something is a basic human need. Shelter. We talk about food, clothing, shelter.

[00:03:05] A basic need in the Maslow-Need hierarchy has become and is being converted into asset class investment vehicles for wealthy clients. And so to give some idea of how this works, and this is the way it's worked in Jacksonville, corporate entities, and they could be private equity firms, they could be institutional investors, they could be real estate investment trusts. But they come into Jacksonville, they buy up hundreds and thousands of single-family homes. They convert the single-family homes into rental properties.

[00:03:34] Then they bundle the rental properties into portfolios. And they offer up these portfolios as investment opportunities for their clients. And David and Katie, welcome to Mike's on Mike. We appreciate you folks joining us today. And I'd like to say at the outset, the reason we had this idea to invite you to was because of Sherry McGill's newsletter that comes out on Friday when she had that really wonderful piece on your report, your study. I want to ask this question.

[00:04:03] Thank you.

[00:04:35] I don't think it's a priority at all for the city council. Collectively, there may be a couple members on the city council who are interested in this topic. But generally, the city council has not paid significant attention to the issue of, and we're talking about rental housing. This is what we're focusing on. So we're talking about the situation faced by working-class tenants in Jacksonville. And that certainly is not a priority of the city council. We're operating in a relatively conservative political environment in Jacksonville. And the city council reflects that.

[00:05:04] And this simply is not a priority. Tenants are not a priority. Landlords have much more influence. Builders have much more influence. Developers have much more influence. In terms of what Deegan is doing, the public-private partnership, which is the standard way that we have been approaching housing for a long time, in my view, is largely insufficient. This involves incentivizing private for-profit entities to provide affordable housing.

[00:05:32] They have no interest in providing affordable housing normally, and they wouldn't be providing it if they weren't incentivized in various ways. So what you have to do then is you have to create tax breaks, tax credits, subsidies, some financing at favorable terms in order to get the builders and the developers to provide some percentage of the units, let's say, in a multifamily apartment complex that would be considered affordable.

[00:05:59] I would put affordable in quotes because often that still doesn't translate into the kind of affordable housing we need. So I would say the Deegan administration has made affordable housing an emphasis. They talk about it a lot. She campaigned on it. I think they're committed to it, but they're wedded to a model that I believe we have used for a long time. It has been insufficient, and we need to think about alternative ways to achieve the objectives that ideally safe and affordable housing would to realize.

[00:06:29] Council opposition to public housing is not the only thing that's been in the way. In 2025, Councilman Rory Diamond championed what was called middle housing, which is a term I'd never heard before. It allows more duplexes, triplexes, and quadruplexes in existing neighborhoods. But loud neighborhood opposition stopped that effort last year.

[00:06:50] Is middle housing a money grab by residential developers, or is middle housing just a part of the solution of the crisis? Or is it being employed in other cities? There's definitely a kernel of truth with middle housing. Middle housing, that being housing between two to six units. It depends which organization is describing it.

[00:07:14] But that housing is the bulk of America's naturally occurring affordable housing stock. It's called NOAA. And so the reason for that is because often these units are occupied by their owner-occupied, meaning that an owner is living in one of those units, and then they're renting out those other units. And if you live somewhere, a lot of your viewers are probably homeowners. You have more of a vested interest in caring for that property. And often these owner-occupied units aren't looking to make a huge profit.

[00:07:43] They're just looking to cover a portion of their mortgage, and they're still paying for their unit. And so middle housing, that especially is older in Jacksonville, is a super essential resource to keep. But the issue is, across the board, new developments are not a source of new affordable housing. There are projects, of course, where there are capital incentives put forward that cap the amount that residents pay,

[00:08:09] or it caps the income relative to the area median income that residents can make to live somewhere. But outside of that, new developments often end up increasing local rent prices because the new developments often result in surrounding properties. Their property values increasing and that becoming more of a newer area that is able to charge higher rents. I've watched Jacksonville pursue growth for decades.

[00:08:34] At what point should a city stop measuring their success by how fast it grows and start measuring success by whether people already living here can afford to pay that rent? Yeah, I think that these things don't need to be necessarily in opposition to each other. But I think the way that the supply and demand logic and rental housing is pushed, and especially this push towards homeownership being the only option,

[00:09:01] when not acknowledging that there are a lot of especially young people in the city that have to rent. There are already any money that they could have been putting towards a down payment. They have to live somewhere now. So they're renting now. There needs to also be an acknowledgement that renters exist and that these people should have some protections and that they should be able to have money that they can put aside if they want to buy a home, which currently that is not the situation. If you want a city of homeowners, you need to have rent prices that aren't gouging people.

[00:09:31] I want to go back to restrictive zoning for a minute. Housing economists seem to think that's one reason or one of the reasons we have high housing costs and a lack of housing supply. But historically, Jacksonville has abundant land and relatively few housing restrictions or growth policies. If zoning restrictions is a primary reason for some of this,

[00:09:56] why is Jacksonville experiencing the same housing affordability problems as much more restrictive cities? That is an excellent question. And what I would tell you is that the larger critique we make of the existing policies that are the dominant conventional ways to approach affordable housing. I would call them supply side policies and tax breaks, incentivizing private developers, etc. Another one is deregulation, right?

[00:10:24] And by deregulationist approaches, that means that you eliminate zoning regulations and you open it up to investors to be building homes or apartments or whatever it happens to be so that you're not having exclusionary zoning, which implies that essentially you've got residential areas that are exclusively zoned for single-family homes and single-family homes of a certain size, a certain plot, and other kinds of specifications. I don't think there's anything wrong with reforming the zoning laws.

[00:10:53] I just don't believe, and the evidence has shown this from some major studies, is that zoning changes do not in any significant way reduce the cost of housing or produce the kind of affordable and safe housing that working-class tenants would need. So you have to think, even if they open up space for additional development in some of these areas of the city, who's going to be doing the building? For what population? For what purpose? For what ends?

[00:11:20] And there's no guarantee that just because there's more supply of various forms of housing, and this could be the missing middle kind of housing that Katie was talking about, there's no guarantee that this is going to be affordable. These people are investing because they want a return on their investment. And really what we have here between the last two questions is the NIMBY versus YIMBY. You've got the not in my backyard. These are the homeowners that are worried about their property values.

[00:11:48] Then you've got the YIMBYs that say, let's just eliminate all the regulations and open it up for developers and builders. I would like people to think more about FIMBY. Most people aren't familiar with that one. That's public housing or social housing in my backyard. I think we have to start looking at alternative models for that. I think your point is very well taken that if you look at Jacksonville, there's no reason why you would think that thesis would hold.

[00:12:17] The council seems to be willing in some cases to support incremental housing on housing reforms, but not large scale density changes. Are these incremental housing reforms, are they symbolic or can they actually help move the needle? I think largely, like Dr. Jaffe just mentioned, a lot of the new development that's being proposed or attempting to be incentivized through these changes, recently there was a missing middle proposal that went through the zoning committee,

[00:12:47] and I believe it was shot down. But you can't just will increase density into existence. There needs to be a reason for developers to build in the first place. So unless that involves you paying the developer through capital subsidies, they are not just going to build because that's a priority. And I think also another side of this that isn't really talked about with density is Jacksonville is one of the largest city that doesn't have any kind of robust transit infrastructure.

[00:13:15] We have a bus network, but it's not super reliable. I take it every day. I don't have a car, so I'm very familiar. But if we really want to close this gap between wages and the opportunity for people to make money, economic opportunities, there needs to be an investment with transit. There needs to be a willingness to do public investment in a public good that then naturally will result in increased density because it will be a good thing that there is now a transit stop in a neighborhood.

[00:13:45] Then developers will have a reason to build. I can tell you from personal experience of working for 16 years for the transit agency here in town, it's a very tough and complicated issue to deal with. Because of the costs that are incurred, transit systems do not make money. Keep in mind, JTA is not a city agency. It's actually a state agency. It's the only one of the independent agencies that has its own state statute.

[00:14:12] And because of that, you don't have the support, financial support from the city, which is why they did the gas tax issue a few years ago so that the city wouldn't have to help supplement it. So I hear you. And I certainly know from past experience my relationship with UNF and their transit needs that I've talked to them about numbers of times when I was with the agency. But it's a very important fact. And that whole transit environment needs to be overhauled

[00:14:41] and needs to be expanded in some manner throughout the entire city because this 841 acres that we have, or square miles rather, that we have is a tough way to hold it and to do it. And going back to what we also said, in recent years Florida legislature really has been dismantling the ability of cities to govern themselves what's known as home rule. And one of the latest is Florida's Live Local Act, which is taking away those decisions, those zoning decisions, from local hands.

[00:15:10] Is that a necessary response to local resistance, or does it undermine the community planning? I think generally preemptions at the state level aren't a great thing. And the zoning specifically, the reforms don't actually seem to have generated that much demand for development, that much generation of permits for new buildings. For all the reasons that we've already laid out, is if there's not necessarily a reason to build somewhere, having just an open zoning code doesn't mean that builders are going to build.

[00:15:39] But also I'd say another part of this Live Local Act that was preempted was tenant protections, which was a really big thing as around the state. There were tenant bill of rights that were being passed, which would make it more difficult for tenants to be evicted. Some cities were trying to use a loophole from a previous state preemption to initiate rent control measures at 5% increase every year, in addition to inflation. And several other tenant protections that were attempted to be passed at the time

[00:16:08] were preempted by that bill. And so I think that is the bigger story from that act, is the difficulty now that there's a very narrow window of what can be passed to protect tenants in the state. Yeah, and I would just say the Live Local Act is largely, again, incorporating the kinds of policies we've been talking about, which we don't think are effective. And that is largely tax breaks, tax credits, different kinds of subsidies to builders and developers who obviously run the joint when it comes to Florida.

[00:16:35] And those have not proven to be the ways in which you actually can generate the kind of housing that's going to be affordable for working class people. The preemption bill that was passed around the time when we were trying to get a tenant's bill of rights passed in Jacksonville, it had been passed in all the other major cities in Florida. Jacksonville was the only city that did not have a tenant's bill of rights, which says something about Jacksonville and the political climate here. But they passed a preemption bill, which essentially said no locality is permitted to pass any ordinance

[00:17:04] which would regulate the relationship between tenants and landlords. All of those tenants' bill of rights that had passed in those major cities that were passed democratically by city councils or county commissions were null and void overnight. So when we talk about what can we do in Jacksonville, we have to understand that there are severe limitations that a city can implement regarding affordable housing given the preemption. And the preemption has been used a lot by the state legislature to prevent exactly what you were talking about,

[00:17:33] and that is home rule and local democratic deliberation. Kind of do a question of summary here again. Do you think that the housing affordability crisis is primarily because of lack of supply, a crisis of investor ownership, or a crisis of poverty and wages, or is it a combination of all those? Yeah, that's a good question. All of them play a role. Now, we started our research project primarily looking at

[00:18:02] what was the primary factor explanation for the sharp rise in rent across the country, but particularly in Jacksonville. Jacksonville was ranked among the top five, top ten, major metropolitan areas that saw the largest absolute increase and large percentage increase in monthly rent. So for that particular question, we clearly fall on the side of corporate ownership. That's why the name of the book is The Financialization of Human Shelter, because more and more human shelter,

[00:18:31] more and more properties acquired by these corporate entities have been essentially being used as ways to extract income and asset appreciation. And as I was trying to say before, I think it's important that you understand if these are investment properties, people who invest in them expect a return on their investment. And the only way they're going to get a return on their investment is if the owners and the property managers who enforce the rules of the owners

[00:18:58] are increasing rents, adding fees, and neglecting maintenance. And this is exactly what we've seen across Jacksonville in the multifamily apartment complexes, in particular, that we observed. Now, the problem, and one thing we take on in the very first chapter of this book is before we can even introduce a financialization thesis, we really had to dispense of the one that everyone assumes is the primary factor, and that is supply and demand, the market-based explanation.

[00:19:26] The market-based explanation does not explain the current situation of the rental housing market in Jacksonville or outside Jacksonville. The notion is essentially that lots of people are moving to Florida, they're moving to Jacksonville. We don't have a sufficient number of units or number of housing. We have a supply shortage, and therefore, we need to do everything we can, as I said before, to use these supply-side incentives. But the point is that the rental housing market

[00:19:55] doesn't operate the way people think a market might operate in Economics 101. In fact, you have enormous amounts of concentrated ownership, you have price-fixing, landlords are not competing with each other, and tenants are not free to choose. They can't just move from one place to another based on price signals. So all of the things that go into this oversimplified supply and demand model are insufficient.

[00:20:22] Obviously, we have a low-wage economy in Jacksonville, so you have a low-wage labor market and you have a high-rent housing market. You put those two things together and the gap increases, and more and more working-class tenants are suffering in terms of making ends meet, being able to pay rent, and many of them are displaced and ultimately become homeless. On the November ballot, we are going to see a constitutional amendment that's going to be asked of residents here, voters here, not residents necessarily,

[00:20:52] but voters here, about doing away with increasing homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 and then $250,000 the year after. It would seem to me, that's going to mean, by the way, initially of a $300 million debt, debit that we're going to have in our city government. Now, part of that, I'm going to assume, is going to mean that those people who do have higher homes and businesses are going to probably see an increase in taxes

[00:21:20] in order to make up that hole. When they do it to the residential development community, those developers are not going to eat those higher fees they're going to have to pay. They're going to pass them on to the renters. What is that going to do to the already difficult situation we're sitting in right now where there's not enough housing, number one, and then secondly, people can't afford the housing that is available out there. What is that going to do if this passes?

[00:21:49] It's going to make it worse across the board for every kind of service that people expect from local governments. And as you said, if the property tax rate goes down, obviously governments, state government, and local governments are going to have to make this up some other way and you're going to see a large increase in fees. You'll probably see proposals for increasing sales taxes and all of those things are going to have the consequences that you're mentioning. Florida doesn't have a state income tax and everyone thinks that's wonderful,

[00:22:17] except governments still have to find money somehow. And so in Florida, you have what is considered when you rank all the states, we have the most regressive tax system in the country. Because all of the ways in which we find revenue are regressive in form rather than progressive, which an income tax would be. Yeah, let's end with this. If Mayor Deegan handed you the keys to the city hall for one year, what are the first three housing priorities

[00:22:47] you try to implement? First of all, I would create a Office of Housing Resources. This is something we've talked about. And by the way, when the Tenants Bill of Rights was essentially null and void by virtue of the preemption of the state legislature, there were a couple of provisions in the Tenants Bill of Rights we were proposing in Jacksonville that are still viable. And I do not believe they in any way violate the preemption bill. One is an Office of Housing Resources, which would provide renters and even landlords

[00:23:16] with lots of information about their rights and their obligations. It would be a place where renters and tenants could get information about the existing properties, about what the city offers, and importantly, a place where they could file complaints with landlords when they have them. And believe me, there are many tenants in Jacksonville who are suffering from horrible conditions. Within that office, I would have a rental or landlord registry. This is something else we've been promoting and we've talked to city council members about this.

[00:23:46] We need to have a way to know who owns every piece of property. It should be publicly searchable. It should provide any renter with information about who owns the property and what kind of record they have and the code violations and the eviction filings. We have started a registry like that on our Jax Rental Housing Project website. You can find it for multifamily apartment complexes. And the third thing I think I would try to do, I'd like to do four. Okay, so let me say the third thing I'd want to do

[00:24:15] is to definitely invest much more money in code compliance. And that means staffing and enforcement and a much more rigorous system of inspections of rental property. Right now, landlords, it's like the Wild West out there. Landlords get away with almost everything and the tenants are in largely a very weak position vis-a-vis landlords and are not really in a position to challenge them. And ideally, I think we need to think about alternative ways to provide affordable housing, a revolvable fund

[00:24:45] that would provide funding for publicly owned, non-profit, mixed income housing. And there are efforts at this. The best example is in Montgomery County, Maryland, where they have created a financing mechanism to do this and you can acquire existing properties that are being owned by slumlords or you can invest in building new ones. But the point is it's publicly owned, it's non-profit, there's no profit hurdle that has to be met, there are no shareholders

[00:25:14] that have to be satisfied and I think this has to be one element of the housing market. Everybody, we're out of time, we appreciate very much the two of you being on here. Thank you, Katie. Good to see you. Good to see you too, as David. And once again, the name of the book is The Financialization of Human Shelter, The Rental Housing Crisis in a Sunbelt City. It's published by Emerald Points and by the way, if your publisher happens to have 19 promotional copies that they could give away, the fourth floor of City Hall would be a wonderful place

[00:25:43] to distribute them. Absolutely. Meanwhile, thank you all for joining us. We'll see you again next time and to our donors, thank you so much for keeping our program going and keeping the lights on and the cameras rolling. We'll see you again soon. Bye-bye. Mike's on Mike with Mike Tolbert, Mike Hightower, and Mike Miller can be found on your favorite podcasting platform, Facebook, and YouTube. Visit the website at Mike'sOnMike.com. Join us next time for more conversation with Mike's On Mike.