U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge called sunny Miami the “epicenter of the housing crisis in this country” during a visit on Tuesday.
According to the Miami Herald, Fudge made that harsh comment about Miami’s accessibility issues while visiting Liberty Square, a public housing complex in the South Florida city.
For anyone following the rising rental prices in the country, getting to zero in Miami is no surprise. According to Realtor.com, the average global rental price in the Miami – Fort Lauderdale – West Palm Beach region rose nearly 46% in May from the same period last year. Miami has also consistently ranked among the cities in the United States with the fastest rentals this year. (Realtor.com is operated by NWSA News Corp,
subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, which is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
“It’s very different when you see it for yourself,” said Fudge, who visited government-funded apartment complexes and met with local officials Tuesday, according to WFOR-TV, a CBS affiliate in Miami. “That’s why I’m here. It is important that we face the housing crisis. “
According to the Miami Herald, Fudge suggested reforms to local zoning rules as a potential solution, as well as allocating money to relieve COVID to alleviate the pinch.
The Biden administration has consistently stressed the need to build more housing in the U.S., and the White House said last month that it wanted to offer incentives to cities that promote housing density. In addition, President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 includes $ 35 billion in mandatory funding to HUD so state and local housing finance agencies, as well as their partners, can offer grants. and financing tools to build more housing and remove barriers to development.
But the need for help in Miami is immediate. The mayor of Miami-Dade, Daniella Levine Cava, has declared the accessibility of housing a crisis, and media reports have presented stories of tenants who have been forced to leave the city, abandoning their houses often more than a decade because their owners decided to sell, as well as protests over the increase in rent.