More than 2.5 million low-income Florida households now spend over 30 percent of their income on housing, and 1.4 million of those spend more than half, according to the Florida Housing Coalition’s newly released Home Matters 2026 report, presented this week at the group’s annual conference in Orlando.

The numbers on entry-level homeownership are stark. Homes selling for under $200,000 made up 26.5 percent of Florida sales in 2019; by 2025 that share had collapsed to just 6.2 percent. Meanwhile, homes selling for $500,000 or more nearly tripled their share of the market, climbing from 11.4 percent to 35.4 percent over the same period — a shift that has priced a generation of first-time buyers out of the traditional path to homeownership.

“There are only 25 available units for every 100 extremely low-income renters,” said Tampa Bay developer Khalil Majied, CEO of Property Scholars, who attended the conference.

Ashon Nesbitt, executive director of the Florida Housing Coalition, said the report tracks the state’s progress each year. He noted the strain is worst for the lowest earners, and said more than 30,000 privately owned affordable units statewide are at risk of disappearing from the market entirely by 2034.

What the report doesn’t dwell on is the other side of the ledger: years of local zoning restrictions, permitting delays and land-use rules that have made it harder and more expensive to build the kind of modest, entry-level housing that used to fill the sub-$200,000 bracket. Supply constraints — not just rising demand — are a big part of why starter homes have all but vanished from the market.

On the funding side, state lawmakers again fully funded the State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP) and State Apartment Incentive Loan (SAIL) programs for a sixth straight year, and approved $50 million for the Hometown Heroes down-payment assistance program. Innovative SAIL, a Live Local Act program aimed at additional affordable rental housing, received no funding this cycle, and the Coalition noted that overall state housing funding fell compared to last year — even as lawmakers continued backing the programs with the most direct track record.

Nesbitt framed the issue as one that extends beyond low-income renters. “It’s a community-wide issue. It’s an economic development issue,” he said, pointing to the number of common occupations that no longer pay enough to comfortably cover local housing costs.

Majied said his own work has shifted toward connecting affordable rental housing to a longer-term path toward ownership — an approach several Tampa Bay-area developers are also pursuing through the Tampa Bay Partnership’s regional Housing Equation initiative covering Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties.

For now, the report’s authors say the central challenge isn’t simply building more units, but preserving the affordable stock that already exists while keeping a path open toward ownership for renters who want one.

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