Ron DeSantis sees today’s housing market as a “bad situation” that’s “very difficult” to navigate for the young people emerging from college who want to buy homes.
“We’ve got to do better as a country,” the Florida Governor said Saturday during a Never Back Down townhall in Newport, New Hampshire.
DeSantis, who attributes much of the market pressure to “inflation” he blames on President Joe Biden, says the issue has gotten acute in recent years.
“If you go back five years and you took the median priced home in the United States and then compared it to today, the medium priced home in the United States, the mortgage payment is almost, is more than twice as much today for the median home than it was five years ago,” DeSantis said.
“Has median income doubled? No. How do you make it work when you have this massive gap between the median income and the median home? And so you’re in a situation where just simply raising a family is becoming cost prohibitive, the groceries and all that add to it,” DeSantis added. “The cars, the cars are less affordable than they’ve ever been.”
While noting that Florida has “good tax incentives” and initiatives like the Hometown Heroes program, which helps active-duty military members, nurses, teachers, and law enforcement officers and other first-time home buyers buy homes in cities where they work if their credit qualifies and they meet minimum income thresholds, DeSantis noted that supply constraints affected markets in Florida and beyond.
“I think the supply is the biggest problem and some of that’s government bureaucracy that’s not letting people build housing, but we need to build more single family homes. We need to build more multi family for young people to be able to do and be able to afford. And in Florida, we’ve, you know, we’ve moved the ball forward on that,” DeSantis said, before admitting limitations.
“Now we have so much demand for people wanting to move to Florida that the construction hasn’t been able to keep up with the demand. And so they’re doing more to be able to get that done.”
As well, the Governor said “reducing inflation will make a huge, huge difference because you now have interest rates over 7% on a 30 year fixed mortgage. That ain’t going to work.”
“The problem is the thing that’s leading the most inflation is housing costs. But when you have people that bought a house three years ago, they’re not going to want to sell that and then move into another house when the interest rate is 7% because they’re down. Their monthly payment is a lot less. So it’s creating, I think a bad situation with housing and I worry what could happen over the next year or two.”
DeSantis believes that moves to “expand energy, stop spending so much money, get the bureaucracy off and then build more homes” are necessary, “because if we don’t do that, I think you’re going to see some really, really rough sledding.”
“The economics of this just isn’t working out,” DeSantis said. “If young twentysomethings want to get married and have a family — that was kind of the norm, maybe 50 or 60 years ago — people are waiting longer and they can make whatever decision they want.”
“But now if you wanted to do that, like, right out of college, you would have a very difficult time making any of that work and we’ve got to do better as a country. So I think it’s an important thing and you’re right, you save up that much money and like you can’t afford a down payment, that’s not going to work for the American middle class.”
Florida, of course, deals with spiking housing costs and one of the most troubled property insurance markets in the country. But as DeSantis’ comments in the Granite State suggest, things are tough all over.
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