The call for smaller lot sizes to ease Florida’s housing crisis

ST PETERSBURG — Although officials say there’s no “silver bullet” to cure Florida’s affordable housing crisis, an argument that smaller lot sizes can be a significant part of the solution was the topic of a panel discussion this week at the Florida Housing Solutions Summit in St. Petersburg.

The day-long forum was organized by the Florida Policy Project, a think tank created by former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes after he left the Legislature in 2023. It came days after The Wall Street Journal reported that net domestic migration in Florida has slowed after an influx of wealthy people from other states helped drive up home prices.

The average median sale price of a home in Florida ranges between $375,000 to $417,000. That’s up from an average of $253,000 before the pandemic.

Brita Wallace, general counsel to the group Texans for Reasonable Solutions, pointed to the city of Houston’s example.

After Houston reduced its minimum lot size in the late 1990s from 5,000 square feet to as low as 1,400 square feet, 34,000 town homes were built between 2007 and 2020, she said. While the median assessed value of a typical new single-family house is $540,000 there, the median price assessed value of a town home is $340,000.

“The result of this policy was … creating housing that’s more like your starter home price point in Houston,” she said — more attainable for “your average person in Houston.”

Starter homes used to account for about 40% of all new homes in the United States, but now that figure is under 10%, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Austin, Texas, meanwhile, amended its development code to ease regulations for ADUs (accessory dwelling units, sometimes called granny flats or in-law units) by reducing the minimum lot size from 7,000 to 5,750 square feet, removing the requirement for a second driveway, and reducing the number of required parking spaces from two to one. ADUs are now permitted on the majority of single-family lots.

Failed housing legislation in 2026

During the legislative session in Tallahassee this session, a proposal to allow ADUs at a single-family residences (HB 247) failed to advance. “I think there’s a desire and some enthusiasm to continue fighting and pushing” for the bill, said Rep. Bill Conerly, R-Lakewood Ranch, who sponsored the measure in the House.

Rep. Danny Nix, R-Port Charlotte, introduced legislation in the 2026 session (HB 1143) called “The Florida Starter Homes Act.” The proposal would have banned local governments from requiring minimum lot sizes larger than 1,200 square feet for residential properties connected to public water and sewer, while also limiting their ability to impose stricter setback, height, density, and parking requirements.

Nix said the proposal is needed in the state’s biggest metro areas, like the Tampa Bay area, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Miami.

“This all came to me because I’m tired of seeing people who can’t live, work, and play in the same area,” Nix said during a panel discussion. “At the end of the day, we’re asking people to come in here and be our servers, our firefighters, our police officers, but they’re having to drive 30 to 45 minutes just to get to work.”

The bill drew pushback from the Florida League of Cities this year. Nix says he’s been working with the organization “to try to make it a little bit better.”

“The bill just overall would have made it so that you could build starter homes,” said University of Florida student Avery Bernstein, a housing activist who helped work on the proposal. “In a lot of areas, you just can’t build starter homes.”

“The Starter Home bill is probably going to take a little more work in the sense that I try to work with the cities and counties, try to come up with some good language that everybody can somewhat agree to,” said Sen. Stan McClain, R-Ocala, who sponsored the bill in the Senate.

Until local governments pass legislation to reduce mandated lot sizes, former Sen. Brandes said, homebuilders will continue to charge more for the land they purchase.

He referred to the Shore Acres area on Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg, where, he said, homes were valued between $400,000 to $800,000 before Hurricane Helene devastated the area in late 2024. After many of those homes were destroyed, the owners sold them because it didn’t make financial sense to rebuild.

Big developers came in to purchase those properties, but because they weren’t able to divide them, they paid around $500,000 per lot, Brandes said. That meant they had to sell those properties for more than $1 million to make a profit, putting them out of reach of many working families.

“We’ve lost this whole area of affordability, and I think that’s an important conversation that cities start to need having — especially post-disaster — is allowing for lot-splits, smaller lot sizes. All of these things kind of add up,” he said.

“If you want to talk about one policy lever that will move the needle on affordability, it is smaller lots,” said Charbel Barakat, vice president and counsel to homebuilder D.R. Horton. “If you make the lots more affordable, you cut the red tape and the regulatory process allows us to get to the finish line faster but safer and more reasonably, of course. That’s how you get affordability.”

Barakat cited the latest findings from the Council of Economic Advisers’ Economic Report of the President, which cited a “bureaucratic tax” that combines zoning restrictions, fees, delays, and building mandates that now make up more than 29% of the cost of a new home as a real issue.

Bernstein discussed several housing bills that passed during the session but concluded “there wasn’t anything that passed that significantly resulted in enough new smaller single-family homes on smaller lots with smaller setbacks being built that’s actually going to allow younger people and working class and middle-class people to buy more homes.”