Valuable new census data can shape housing, transit plans

The US Census Bureau last week pulled back the curtain on reams of data gathered last year that fill in the facts on trends that most of us are vaguely aware of, fleshing out the picture of Miami-Dade County in detail.

Now we can specify what we once generalized, which could influence public policy.

For example, a frequent topic of this column is the apparent inability of mass transit to lure drivers off our highways. The survey of workers in this county 16 years and older who took public transportation to work bears out the concern: despite a reasonable transit network (we can debate how reasonable) just 3.6% of all trips to work were by public transit. Exactly half as many (1.8%) merely walked to work, and 2.7% took other means than motor vehicles – that could be bicycles or whatever.

Meanwhile, nearly three quarters of all workers (74.5%) drove alone to work. Only 8.8% of workers carpooled, showing that if government could somehow incentivize carpooling it could be more impactful than if it doubled mass transit use – a 50% addition to carpooling would be more riders than all mass transit use combined, while adding no cars.

We certainly aren’t lacking in vehicles in which to carpool: only 9.8% of all housing units had no vehicles available, the survey found, while more than half (51.7%) had two or more vehicles available and 16.5% – one of every six households – has three or more vehicles available.

Because the survey was taken after covid’s peak impact, it showed 8.7% of us in this county worked from home. Staying home was a time-saver: the mean time of commutes to work by all methods in Miami-Dade was 32 minutes last year – more than an hour roundtrip versus 27.9 minutes each way for the state as a whole.

When we go to work, what do we do? Some 82.2% of us are private wage and salary workers, 9.6% of us work for government (in Miami-Dade, a declining percentage) and 8% of us are self-employed in non-incorporated businesses. The final two-tenths of those who work are unpaid workers in their own families, the census tells us.

The mean household income in the county – dividing total income by total households – was $87,004, which is just below the state’s mean household income of $88,267. But looking at the median household income – the midpoint among all incomes – the county level was $57,815 versus $61,777 for Floridians as a whole.

The larger the difference between mean and median levels, the greater the spread of income. In Miami-Dade, 4.2% of families had incomes below $10,000. Extending the range to a total income of less than $25,000 included 15.7% of families who today (after the time of the survey) are battling inflation rates in this county above 10% a year.

At the other end of the scale, 8.8% of families had incomes of $200,000 or more. The number grows to 30.8% of all families with incomes above $100,000.

As health costs were of particular concern during the pandemic, 84.4% in this county had some form of health insurance, 55.9% with private insurance and 33% with public insurance (some had both), while, despite so-called Obamacare, 15.6% of us had no health insurance at all. Some 7.2% of those age 19 and under had no health insurance coverage.

A major economic concern in local government has been housing availability at reasonable costs. In a county with 442,883 housing units where rent was paid last year, the median rent was $1,517 per month. Nationally, the median rent per household was $1,163.

Rent levels here showed very wide disparities. Some 22.3% of renters paid $2,000 or more a month, the census found, with 4.3% paying $3,000 or more monthly. At the other end, 16.9% paid less than $1,000 per month and 6.6% paid less than $500 per month.

Looking at rent paid as a percentage of household income shows a clearer picture of the concern for housing affordability: more than half of Miami-Dade County renters (55%) are paying 35% or more of their household incomes for rent. Until recent years, budgeting principles were that 25% of income was the most that should be spent on housing. In Miami-Dade, just 25.1% of all renters are paying 25% of income or less for rent.

The vast majority of us are living in housing built in the last century – just 23.2% of us live in housing built in 2000 or later. And 48.9% of us live in housing built in 1980 or later, meaning more than half of us live in housing more than 40 years old in a community where a deadly collapse of a 40-year-old condo building in Surfside last year still resonates.

The median value of the housing units we live in is $374,700, but with a vast range. Some 13.8% of us live in units worth less than $200,000, while 7% of us live in housing worth $1 million or more. On Fisher Island, the median value of a residence is well more than $2 million – the highest level that census figures go. And in the county’s owner-occupied units, 59.6% are still paying a mortgage – below the national percentage of 62.1%.

As we look at public policy, these actual survey figures should illuminate our path.