Miami rents aren’t going up as much. That’s great, but we still need higher salaries | Opinion

South Florida rental prices are finally flattening out. Hallelujah. We’ve lived in one of the most unaffordable places in the nation for so long, a small bit of positive news like this sounds like cause for a full-on celebration.

And why not? All that suffering through high-rise construction — the ripped-up roads, the traffic tie-ups, the noise and dust — is finally paying off in what housing experts called “a sharp cooldown.” (If only that would describe the summer weather, too.)

All the new housing on the market, the housing experts told the Miami Herald, is one of the key reasons for the improved rental picture. The relocation of corporations during the pandemic was one of the drivers behind the building boom of the past few years. There’s so much competition in the rental real estate market that some apartments are offering a month or two of free rent to qualified renters, something we haven’t seen in a very long time.

This is a real change: After two years of average rent increases of 25% in 2021 and 7% in 2022, rents rose less than 1%.

Hold on, though. Experts also say that although prices may have peaked and even dropped a bit, they aren’t likely to come down much in this region. And they are still far higher than in 2019, before the public-health crisis hit.

That means the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties last month was still $2,052, down slightly from a year ago, but far above the median in 2019 of $1,491. That’s according to Apartment List, an online real-estate marketplace that released a report on the rental shift in South Florida.

There’s really only one solution. We need higher salaries in South Florida. So much of the job market is stuck in the days when living here was cheap. But the new companies coming into Miami should set the tone — and set a higher salary structure — if they want to keep employees from fleeing to places with more reasonable housing costs.

And that’s a real issue, too: Despite the welcome news in the South Florida region, in Miami-Dade specifically, rental prices in the past year rose by about 6%, a national real estate consulting firm told the Herald.

After decades of real estate prices that were relatively cheap, South Florida has become known as a place plagued by a lack of affordable housing. That will hamper growth. Business leaders who see Miami as an attractive market to relocate their headquarters need to play a role, along with elected officials, in fixing the problem. If Miami hopes to realize all its big-league city dreams, it has to offer big-time salaries, too.