Florida ranks second nationwide, after California, with the highest portion of "working households" spending at least half their income on housing costs, according to a new survey.

Wake up and good morning. It feels wrong at first. How can Florida -- where housing prices have dropped like a stone for years -- rank No. 2 behind pricey California as the state with the highest number of "working households" paying at least half of their income on housing costs? According to this new Center for Housing Policy survey, a third of Florida working households pay more than half their income on housing.

The trick, of course, is not that housing costs have not dropped in Florida. It is that household income has dropped faster, thus forcing more working households to pay more of a smaller paycheck to cover housing. ... Read more

Tampa's Moffitt Cancer Center subsidiary M2Gen, shown above, has helped create the world's largest, cancer-focused biorepository (fancy talk for a gigantic freezer of cancer tumors) that should get more attention in a new leadership reorganization. (Photo courtesy of M2Gen)

Updated to clarify new roles for Bill Dalton and Thomas Sellers.

Wake up and good morning. New jobs and new leadership priorities announced by Tampa's Moffitt Cancer Centersuggest there's a refocusing under way at the center to throw more resources at the increasingly competitive business of "personalized" medicine that leverages the genetic make-up of individual patients in their treatment. ... Read more

Wake up and good morning. Kudos to the Tampa Bay business community's rallying -- thus far -- around the University of South Florida in the face of the Neanderthal extortion tactics by lame duck Senate budget chairman JD 'My Way or the Highway' Alexander to gut USF's budget because he isn't getting his independent Polytech University fast enough for his Polk County legacy.

This was only inning one. It is critical for the Tampa Bay business community to sustain its support and pressure on Tallahassee to be fair in how it legislates. Given all of Florida's challenges, it's truly pathetic that all this time and resource must be spent dealing with what is, at its heart, the selfish whims of playground bullies who feel their inflated roles as state lawmakers is to polish their own resumes or pad their own pockets. ... Read more

Wake up and good morning. The state-run Citizens Property Insurance business has never been a favorite with Floridians, though it came in handy in the early days -- post Hurricane Andrew -- when private insurance essentially fled the state. It's not much better now, though Florida Gov. Rick Scott's solution seems to be the same old plan of old... If Citizens raises the price of its coverage sky high, then other private insurers will be more inclined to enter the Florida property insurance market. (Photo: kevinrothmusic.com)

The trick, of course, is that Florida may end up shooting itself in the foot when people learn (including all those Baby Boomers supposedly coming our way in the coming years) that homeowner insurance payments could rival mortgage payments. Draconian spikes in property insurance are a sure-fire way to destroy the struggling comeback of the Florida housing market. ... Read more