I believe that every family should be able to afford a decent home and have access to excellent public schools for their children. For decades, access to housing and a decent education defined the American Dream in the United States. 

Sadly, Northwest Florida fails to deliver on the American dream, and the situation is becoming dire for many of the families who live here. 

Housing costs continue to rise as our schools continue to fall behind. 

Florida became the least affordable state to live in 2022, despite the fact that Florida was among the worst states to experience increases in adult and child poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness risk during COVID-19.

We’re going to break down how housing became an uncontrolled downward spiral in Northwest Florida, and a few of our ideas on how to fix it. In our next brief, we’ll dissect how migrating public dollars to privately-operated schools decimated public education, and how housing ties directly into the issue. 

Let’s start with the basics.

First: What areas were assessed for this research?

We included only data from the areas included in the recently re-drawn Florida congressional District 1 (CD01). You can view an interactive map of the new boundaries here. Essentially, all of Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties, plus everything in Walton County west of Highway 83/331.

Original source can be found here.