Orlando, the world’s top tourism mecca, was so ripe with the American Dream nine years ago that first-time buyers could purchase a house for less than $100,000. Today, the superheated residential market has become unaffordable for many buyers. Rent hikes have made Orlando a darling of the multifamily investment crowd but have further strapped residents in a wage-challenged economy. As the population swells, bulldozers are demolishing old orange groves and cheap housing to make way for market-rate and luxury communities. “They are basically building new towns with no affordable housing,” said Jaimie Ross, president of the Florida Housing Coalition.

Adequate affordable housing eludes most major U.S. metro areas, but Orlando’s conditions are among the worst. Earlier this year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported that only Las Vegas had a more severe shortage of rentals for the lowest-income families and individuals. Cities such as Boston, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis have twice the rate of affordable housing—at least 40 affordable and available residences for every 100 renter households—while Orlando had just 17.

Orlando’s housing plight has captured Hollywood’s imagination and has figured in a number of recent movies and television programs. Last year’s award-winning film The Florida Project depicts raw motel life for poor families living in the shadow of the city’s theme parks. The movie 99 Homes shows Orlando’s foreclosure frontlines of evictions, squatters, and real estate flippers. And an A+E Networks affiliate filmed the series Zombie House Flipping about purchasing, renovating, and selling abandoned houses there.

How a region known for affordability less than a decade ago could so quickly price out many residents is a story that centers on a booming population, a housing-market collapse, and wages that have stagnated while prices spiked.

Housing pressures have escalated in the last five years; last year, on average, more than 1,000 new residents arrived each week in the country’s eighth-fastest-growing metro region, census numbers show. About 40 percent of that growth came from other states, plus a similar share from Puerto Rico (following Hurricane Maria) and foreign countries. With Orlando’s unemployment rate dropping from 10 percent in 2010 to just 3 percent in mid-2018, jobs have been the primary draw, but there are other factors as well. Central Florida Congressman Darren Soto, who has long represented working-class neighborhoods, says Orlando has simply become increasingly popular, while wages have lagged far behind housing costs. “It’s buyers competing with folks from the Northeast, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and international markets that aren’t tied to the local wages,” he says.

Orlando’s housing crunch hits everyone from the poor to the middle class throughout the 4,000-square-mile metro area. The onetime agricultural hub is bifurcated by 77.5 million annual theme park visitors to the south and 2.5 million metro-area residents largely to the north. This divide has most shortchanged blue-collar neighborhoods near the theme parks in the region’s southern stretches. In Osceola County, for instance, rents rose 11 percent from a year ago to a midpoint of $1,317, according to ALN Apartment Data.

Metro Orlando is home to six of the world’s 10 most-attended theme parks. Walt Disney World’s Central Florida operations alone employed 73,000 workers last year. But theme parks pay as little as $10 an hour. The National Low Income Housing Coalition recently found that the average wage for renters in the Orlando region was $16.80 an hour, which would cover $818 monthly in rent, if following national guidelines that recommend spending no more than one-third of income on housing. But Orlando-area workers earning about $15 per hour are paying about half their income for the median market-rate apartments. Vacancies are increasingly rare and tenants typically need about $3,000 for deposits and initial rent.