ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — After months of anticipation, Orange County commissioners will meet Tuesday to decide whether or not rent control should be on November’s ballot.
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The initiative, proposed by Commissioner Emily Bonilla, would cap rent increases at 5% next year – about an $85 increase for the average one-bedroom apartment – for any landlord that owns more than four units. It would not apply to so-called “luxury” housing units, though how the Florida government defines them is out of touch with the modern cost of housing.
The measure was forced into the public sphere after months of complaints that tenants were being priced out of their homes. Rents rose between 25% and 30% in a 12-month span last year, far greater than the typical 2% to 5% annual hike. Some people saw their monthly bills rise hundreds of dollars, even though landlords made zero improvements to their property.
“I’m hoping that now, we can really step up and do some innovative change,” Bonilla said, adding that she doesn’t know where the other commissioners stand.
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She will need three of them to join her to see the proposal through to November.
Complicating her effort is a consultant’s report released last week that called the situation a housing “crisis” but avoided using the key word “emergency,” which state law requires to make rent control legal. The consultant’s wording isn’t binding, though, and Bonilla said the report appeared to seek ways to maintain the status quo.
She grimaced as she quoted a passage.
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“‘By almost every measure, indicator housing and social conditions are no more adverse than they have been in years, none the less, they are getting outsized attention,’” she read, before looking up. “I mean, the data states otherwise.”
The report went on to say that rent control alone won’t fix the crunch, and the ability to do so is likely out of the county’s hands altogether. That’s because it’s driven by demand created by people trying to move to Central Florida from states like New York and California. According to census data, Orange County adds approximately 1,200 people per week – or 24,000 households per year – yet, the consultant’s study found only 12,000 housing units are built annually.
It leaves lower-income households pushed out to surrounding counties, or like, Latoya Bridges, homeless.
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“It’s just been really rough kind of living,” she said, standing next to her Kia sedan that she has called home for the past three months.
Bridges said her previous landlord pushed her and her two daughters out of their apartment. Since then, help from friends has been unreliable and aid from local organizations, which she said were overwhelmed by people in situations like hers, nonexistent.
Though she holds a full-time job as a security guard, she said it was impossible to get into another lease.
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“You’ve got places that is asking people for $3,090 just to move in,” she said. “When you’re a single mom or single parent period, and you’re just trying to do better for your kids and yourself, it’s been really difficult.”
Bridges has been relying on the Boys & Girls Club and local parks to keep her daughters entertained while she searches for a new home. She has been eyeing a $900-per-month one-bedroom unit that the landlord plainly advertises as “unrenovated.”
Had housing and gas costs remained close to their 2019 levels, she said she would’ve been out of her car after a few days.
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“There’s no affordable housing right now,” she said, gesturing to her 7-year-old, “She deserves to be happy. She deserves to grow up like a kid should. She deserves to not to have to be living on the streets.”
Bonilla knows rent control won’t fix everything but said Orange County needs some combination of overhauls to give families a fighting chance.
“We can’t just do the rent stabilization, hope all of our problems are solved,” she said. “There are many things we should be doing.”
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She suggested Orange County expand its affordable housing budget, buying properties and turning them over to developers under the condition they make some of their units affordable or paying developers to decrease the price of some of their units.
This type of mixed-income housing, she said, along with increasing dense development overall, was the way forward.
“There’s plenty of different creative ways that it could be done,” she explained. “At the end of the day, the county has to own these units to help [make] it happen.”
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