FL - Pushing Back Against Disaster Capitalism in Florida
A coalition of churches has achieved some successes in resisting and mitigating against rent gouging and displacement after Hurricane Ian.
Hurricane Ian blew through Southwest Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in September 2022, inflicting more than $112 billion in damages. A National Hurricane Center report called it the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history, and the third-costliest ever in the United States.
Many in the hardest-hit region of Lee County continue to bear that cost, not just from the physical damage, but at the hands of property owners and developers.
One of those affected is Lorna Washington, a former Fort Myers resident who lived in her 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom rental for two years before she was forced to leave.
“After the storm, since there wasn’t any damage to the property, the owner decided he was going to put it up for sale because of the shortage of housing units from the storm,” she says. “He listed it at a very high price, feeling that people would be desperate and pay that price.”
The house, which she lived in with her two children and two grandchildren and was renting for $2,200, was purchased in 2014 for only $187,000. When it was put on the market in 2023, the asking price was $550,000, despite the fact that no repairs or upgrades had been made in years. The owner, Washington says, lived in New Jersey.
“First he told us we could stay until he sold it, then he changed his mind and told us we had to leave in four days,” she says. “That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever been without a place to stay, and I didn’t know where I was going to lay my head—not just me, but my family, my kids, and my grandkids.”
Rental rates were already on the rise before the storm, she says. According to a 2022 Shimberg Center for Housing Studies report, 28% of Lee County renters are low-income or paying at least 40% of their income on rent. Compounding that is the pandemic bump: From July 2020 to July 2022, 221,000 residents moved to Florida from other states, the largest gain of residents from within the U.S. since 2005. For many, arriving from notoriously expensive states like California or New York, more affordable homes were the driving factor.
“When they came here and saw these lower prices, they gobbled up the real estate and drove the prices up,” Washington says. “To them it’s a bargain, but to locals, we were priced out of the market. We were not accustomed to these prices.”
After the storm, rental rates skyrocketed even further. Though she had been approved for a smaller 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom rental, the landlord wanted $2,700 a month. Just two years prior, a similar property she rented cost only $1,300. After spending a week living between a hotel and an Airbnb, Washington finally found a rental home for $1,800 in Cape Coral.
Hers is one of many stories of how development is reshaping the Lee County landscape. My own parents, whose home in Cape Coral was flooded by record storm surge during the storm, were forced to relocate to St. Petersburg while they cleaned out their house and eventually put it on the market as-is. It sold to buyers from Miami whose primary residence is a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom house worth over $1 million. Because of high interest rates, most buyers fit this profile: investors looking to flip for a profit.
For coastal areas that were totally wiped out, like Fort Myers Beach, developers are seizing the opportunity to drive up prices even further. Most of the post-Ian properties will cost $1 million or more, according to sources quoted by Business Observer; meanwhile, fewer than a third of the low- or middle-income residents who used to live there have been able to return.
If this sounds familiar, it is. After the fires in Maui that destroyed nearly 1,900 homes, developers started reaching out to residents and offering to buy their land, hoping they’d be desperate enough to sell after the long wait for government assistance and insurance payouts. According to residents interviewed by USA Today, many are holding their ground, resisting contributing to the affordable housing crisis the island had already been facing due to a rise in short-term rentals and vacation homes.
