The South Florida housing market is cooling, finally. That’s good — right? | Opinion

Here’s something we haven’t said in a really long time: South Florida’s housing market is slowing down.

You can almost hear the cheers — as long as the bottom doesn’t fall out.

Anyone who has tried to buy a home or rent one in the past year or two knows how brutally expensive housing has become in our region. The dizzying escalation in prices has made it harder to recruit and retain talent, harder for lower-income residents to remain here and harder, especially, for anyone on a fixed income to live here at all. We rely on tourism for our economic survival, but hotel and restaurant workers increasingly can’t afford housing.

Miami has been seriously in danger of becoming a place where only the affluent can live.

Now the market is losing momentum, dramatically, at least in terms of sales, with a 47% drop in existing Miami-Dade home sales in January. Prices remain stubbornly high, though there are indications that some segments of the market, such as higher-end condos, are softening. Rents, meanwhile, have already come down a little.

Is this the much-ballyhooed moderating of the market that experts told us was coming?

Boy, do we hope so. This community’s well-being may depend on it. Too many people have been forced onto the sidelines, unable to buy a home and barely managing rents that have skyrocketed in recent years. Miami is a great place. It shouldn’t be reserved just for those with fat bank accounts.

But having lived through the housing crash of 2008, we’re watching this unfold with a wary eye: A lot of for-sale signs aren’t budging.

We’re told this is far different from that crash 15 years ago, and that seems to be so. This slowdown has been predicted for a while. It’s supposed to be a gradual correction of a market that has been overheated for a few years. No one can doubt the last part of that assertion. And there are other big factors at play, including interest rates that rose quickly as a way to put the brakes on inflation, which is actually happening.

Miami is also different in its own right. Even as the pandemic appears to be winding down, we still have single-family home buyers coming from places like New York and California with cash in hand. More than 40% of January home purchases in Miami-Dade and Broward were cash deals. That’s far higher than the national average of 29%, and it helps keep home prices high.

But the big question, of course, is when will housing prices come down? Maybe this year but maybe not that much, at least according to the experts the Miami Herald spoke to about the changing market.

The slowdown is a necessary correction. The lowering of some rents is a good sign, and the lowering of some housing prices will be helpful. But Miami’s housing crisis isn’t going to be resolved by market forces like dropping prices any time soon, if ever.

Nope, the pressure is still on our city, county and state leaders to take action to make sure South Florida doesn’t ever become a place that only the rich can call home.