Rent in Miami is way too high. Airbnb and Vrbo may be making things worse | Opinion

Are short-term rentals like Airbnb helping to drive up housing costs in South Florida? That’s what a new report in the Miami Herald said Friday.

The report, from a Florida Atlantic University housing expert, was based on anecdotal evidence from conversations with about 200 real estate agents, tenants and developers in 2022, plus rental data from the online site Zillow.

That may not be ironclad proof, but it’s just plain old common sense. If you can get more for your home by renting it short-term, by the week or the month rather than yearly, why would you do anything else? Miami, don’t forget, is one of the most expensive Airbnb markets in the world, ranking after only Las Vegas and Honolulu.

But here’s the thing: If we don’t provide more affordable housing — and by that we mean, housing that doesn’t cost more than a third of your salary — we will continue to drive workers away from this community. And that’s something Miami-Dade County really can’t afford.

Now, it’s true that rents in some areas of the county are falling — like in Sunny Isles Beach, Edgewater and Morningside — amid economic uncertainty and rising interest rates. But rents in most places are still going up. Miami Lakes, Wynwood, Midtown and parts of Miami Beach are among the locations seeing rent hikes between 41% and 65% from a year ago. That’s unsustainable. It will send people out of the region seeking a more-affordable place to live.

Among them: those so-called “essential workers” we have depended on throughout the pandemic.

This is not news in Miami-Dade. Last spring, the county declared a state of emergency on housing. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has also pushed to allocate tens of millions of dollars in rental assistance.

But it’s hard — impossible, really — to overcome the kind of market forces that made Miami-Dade’s rental market the most competitive in the United States in 2022.

We’re glad local policymakers and others are working on long-term solutions for Miami-Dade’s housing-affordability crisis, which has hit especially hard when it comes to affordable and workforce housing. But we need to do more.

Airbnb told the Miami Herald it “is committed to working with local officials on efforts to support housing solutions and Florida’s vacation rental industry.” And the company noted that, “The cost of housing is up everywhere, for everyone, because the country simply has not built enough housing.”

That may be true, but it takes a long time to build a significant amount of new housing.

Here’s a different thought: Tingyu Zhou, a professor of real estate at FAU, told the Miami Herald that policymakers could consider taxing owners who rent their homes for less than a year.

It might make free-marketers howl, but they’ll howl a lot more when South Florida no longer has a workforce.