JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – “A curveball” is how Vernonne Davidson describes what landed him at the Clara White Mission in Jacksonville.
An Army veteran, Davidson said a sudden job loss left him unable to keep up with rising costs.
It’s a story that’s more common than you might think.
Homelessness among Florida families has surged in the last three years as soaring rents and a shortage of affordable housing push more residents into shelters, motels and the streets, a new University of Florida report says.
The UF Shimberg Center for Housing Studies’ 2025 Rental Market Study found that family homelessness rose 28% since 2022 and estimates nearly 30,000 individuals in the state are without stable housing, including more than 6,000 unaccompanied youth.
The study also found median rent for multifamily units climbed about 39% from 2019 to 2023, an increase of roughly $500 a month.
Davidson said while he may be able to afford rent with help from Veterans Affairs, keeping up with other monthly costs is where things get tricky. He’s actively searching for a job.
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“Most people, when they see somebody out on the streets, they immediately put them into one of two categories,” Davidson said. “There’s also a lot of people out there on the streets that are there because of circumstance, because life has hit them with a curveball, and they have had circumstances that are unpreventable, that force them on the streets.”
Locally, the need for shelter has been steady, officials said, and they expect demand to intensify as landlords respond to broader market pressures.
Meg Fisher, chief operating officer of the Clara White Mission, said the nonprofit can house up to 33 veterans at a time and places roughly 60% to 65% of its enrollees into permanent housing within six months.
“We anticipate that as things roll out in the federal government that landlords will begin exhibiting anticipatory behavior and starting to raise the rent for folks needing to move into permanent housing,” Fisher said, warning that such moves could increase the number of people seeking help.
The UF report points to strong population growth — more than 1 million people moved to Florida between 2019 and 2023 — colliding with limited housing supply.
The state added more than 240,000 multifamily units in that period, but experts say most of the new units are not affordable for households earning less than 80% of the area median income.
An estimated 904,000 renter households statewide earn less than 60% of the median income and spend more than 40% of their earnings on housing, the Shimberg Center found.
That cost burden, advocates say, leaves working families and individuals one emergency away from losing housing.
Fisher notes that most of the folks experiencing housing instability are part of the workforce; they just can’t afford a place to live.
“There is a big affordability issue developing in Duval County,” she said.
State incentives such as the Live Local Act, passed in 2023, aim to spur construction of multifamily housing affordable to people near or below median income by offering tax breaks to developers.
But housing advocates and researchers say incentives so far have not produced enough units in the places where the need is greatest.
Policy recommendations circulating among advocates include tax credits to encourage rehabilitation of existing housing, low-income housing tax credits to augment federal programs and targeted incentives for middle-income rental construction.
The Florida Policy Institute has also urged including rehabilitation costs in tax exemptions to expand affordable supply more quickly and support climate resilience.
Back at the Clara White Mission, Davidson said the divide between wages and the cost of living is stark.
“Cost of living has increased several times over the last 30 years, 40 years, but minimum wage has not,” he said.
Advocates warn that without a faster and more targeted expansion of affordable housing and rental supports, homelessness will keep rising across Florida — a trend reflected in the UF study and already felt in shelters in Jacksonville and beyond.
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