Affordable housing crisis continues as many search for answers

Emily Griffiths had been owning this whole adulting thing: Seeking to avoid big college debt, the recent University of Florida grad earned scholarships, worked a job and secured a good internship that has led to a full time job with engineering firm Kimley-Horn. She starts at the firm's Sarasota office in March. 

Now the 22-year-old has hit an adulting speedbump, a hiccup quickly reaching crisis level in the region, if not across most of Florida: the lack of housing — homes, condos or apartments — at price points that meet what's long been the standard rent-to-income ratio of spending 30% or less on your domicile. Griffiths, echoing the thoughts of many — from Tampa, where apartments in some of the priciest neighborhoods are going for $5,000 a month, to Naples, where the median home sale price of $445,000, up 20% over 2020, recently landed it as the No. 1 on the The Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Emerging Housing Markets Index — sums up the situation with this: “These are New York City prices!”