The event served as a fresh front for Boback, who did not respond to requests for comment. He has never been a regular participant in the Florida campaign finance circuit and has not been a longtime political donor.
However, Popack has one thing in common with a new breed of DeSantis benefactor: It’s part of the Florida real estate market.
Over the past year, DeSantis and his allied political committee have raised more than $7 million from real estate developers, investors and landlords, making the industry one of the largest groups of donors for a Republican governor as he prepares to run for reelection — and possibly president.
DeSantis’ re-election campaign, who declined to comment for this story, is working to take advantage of old real estate donors and attract new political money from the industry. Politico’s analysis found that more than $2.5 million of his contributions came from donors aligned with the real estate industry that never provided political currency, or did not provide in multiple election cycles.
The flurry of political criticism was fueled in part by DeSantis’ push to reopen Florida before other states at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a move that helped industry executives boost their bottom line. But it came against the backdrop of an affordable housing crisis increasingly highlighted by Democrats who say the rise is benefiting real estate leaders at the expense of low-income Florida residents.
“The biggest reason I can think of is because the demand is so high, we’re all making a lot of money,” said Pat Neal, a Florida real estate developer and longtime Republican donor who gave $175,000 to DeSantis’ political committee.
Overall, DeSantis has $96 million in cash on hand for his re-election bid, dwarfing nearly $10 million of the total cash available to his three Democratic opponents: Rep. Charlie CrestAgriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Florida Senator Annette Tadeo (D-Miami).
Neil said DeSantis has been a fundraising machine across industries, so much so that he had to find a bigger venue for the last donor event he’s hosting for the governor.
“I was promised a small, intimate event, but we had to move it,” Neil said. “The governor makes a lot of money, there is a lot of interest. There have been a lot of types of builders and developers, agricultural people interested in immigration issues.”
DeSantis raised huge sums from other industries — such as hospitality — that benefited from his early endeavors to reopen Florida’s economy — as well as health care, insurance and finance. But the bulk of it over the past year has come from executives aligned with the real estate industry and associated companies that have benefited from his management’s policies.
“I think the combination of two things, we fully support all of the governor’s open commercial Florida preservation policies,” Carlos Perov, a Sarasota County home builder and longtime Republican donor, said in an interview. The second thing is that I call it the covid phenomenon in real estate. Unfortunately, Covid has been a terrible epidemic on us, but in the real estate industry, there has been a boom.”
“Everyone in this industry has more money,” he added, explaining the surge in new donors in the real estate industry for DeSantis.
For homebuilders and others in residential real estate, DeSantis’ reopening of Florida ahead of most other states has been a turning point for the industry, Perov said.
“I can show you our sales prices, they came off the charts in June, July and August [of 2020]Perov said. “This isn’t just for me. I talk to everyone in the industry, and people want to support the guy who made this.”
Florida Realtors, the state’s largest industry trade group, also cited the Department of Epidemic Control’s policies as a big reason to support them.
“Florida Realtors continues to support Gov. DeSantis as it supports the real estate profession, the real estate industry, and the stakeholders that are a part of it,” Florida Realtors CEO Margie Grant said in an interview. “When the pandemic began in 2020, he ensured that real estate was a core business and that landlords could continue to operate at a time when residential and commercial real estate was more important than ever.”
The industry’s profits, and thus the rise in political contributions, come at a time when housing affordability has reached crisis levels in the state. Rental prices have increased by up to 60 percent in Orlando over the past year. Miami-Dade County Democratic Mayor Daniela Levine Cava has declared an emergency over affordable housing, noting that Florida’s largest county has become “the most unaffordable place in the country.” And rents around Tampa have risen as a result, in part, of people flocking to the area during the pandemic.
“It’s very clear to me that this is the main reason why the governor hasn’t endorsed housing issues, and why he’s been repeating talking points about the industry,” state member Anna Escamani (D-Orlando Democrat) said in an interview. This is clearly motivated by the desire to make money [political] Contributions are a way to prevent any real action, which requires a heavy hand.”
During the recently concluded 2022 legislative session in Florida, a majority of DeSantis and the Republican Party funded entire state housing trusts of just over $300 million. That was the highest level in years, but Democrats and housing advocates said it wasn’t enough because that money has been raided by nearly $2.3 billion over the years. Much of the funding has focused on home ownership – not on affordable rental assistance – and no substantive affordable housing legislation has been passed during the law’s two-month enactment period.
“It’s disingenuous to say that you care about Florida when they do that [Republican leaders] “They choose profits over prosperity,” Iskmani said.
Democrats are increasingly leaning on the issue of affordable housing in the run-up to mid-2022. The governor’s Fried campaign outlined her proposal for affordable housing, including declaring an emergency, earlier this week, and Christ said that if elected he would appoint ” Housing Caesar”.
DeSantis has not outlined a specific plan to deal with the affordable housing crisis in Florida, but he has blamed the issue on President Joe Biden’s administration, which is struggling to rein in soaring inflation.
“If you were to build an apartment complex, it would probably be multifamily, and the cost of that is now 30 percent more,” DeSantis said in February. “This will cost more on the back end of people.”
DeSantis also criticized the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic-era moratorium on evictions, which was designed to continue the suffering of renters in their homes during the height of the pandemic. Founded under former President Donald Trump, it was terminated by the Supreme Court in August 2021 in a move Biden described as “disappointing.”
