Jon Thaxton is the director of Community Investment at Gulf Coast Community Foundation, a former Sarasota County Commissioner and a lifelong resident of Sarasota County.

Sarasota County is a wonderful place to live. For those of us who enjoy its natural environment, recreational opportunities, cultural amenities and so much more—as I have my whole life—we don’t need rankings or surveys to understand how good it is. Yet last week brought another kudo, from a website called Livability.com, whose list of “100 best places to live” put Sarasota atop all other cities in Florida and 31st in the nation.

For the increasing number of our neighbors who can’t afford housing here, though, Sarasota County isn’t paradise. That’s the thrust of a new report commissioned by Gulf Coast Community Foundation and produced by the Florida Housing Coalition. Home Matters for Sarasota County 2015 found that 43,127 low-income households—a quarter of all households in the county—pay over 30 percent of their income for housing, the threshold considered affordable by experts. Of those, more than 18,400 very-low-income households pay more than half of their income for their homes.

On top of this existing need, the report suggests, new demand for affordable housing in Sarasota County could well outstrip supply by more than two to one in the next several years. So, we’re over 43,000 in the hole, and we’re only adding one affordable housing option for every two additional households that will need one. That’s simple math, and it simply doesn’t add up.

Contributing to the need for affordable housing is the dominance of low-wage service jobs in our local economy. Many of the workers who support our top-ranked lifestyle can’t earn enough to survive here themselves. The tradeoffs they must make—choosing transportation or cheap food over medicine or childcare—will only add to taxpayers’ burden for social services and other assistance in the long run.

Other new research complements Gulf Coast’s report, presenting a fuller picture of this issue. While our analysis shows that most of the top 15 jobs in the Sarasota metro area don’t pay enough to affordably rent a one-bedroom apartment, a recent business survey by the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County found that housing affordability is a leading challenge at higher economic levels in the workforce too. If an IT or marketing professional earning, say, $60,000 or more can’t afford to live here, what does that mean for two parents working hard as nursing assistants while raising an infant and a toddler?

A new analysis coming from The Salvation Army of Sarasota further calculates the public costs of chronic homelessness in our region and projects the economic impact of providing sustainable housing solutions. That’s a report I look forward to reading and sharing with stakeholders across our public, private and independent sectors, as it will take consensus-driven strategies with community-wide support to meet our housing needs.

I believe the County Commission and their staff along with our community have done an excellent job crafting and adopting policies that can provide the impetus and framework to meet our collective affordable-housing goals. But we need to measure the effectiveness of these policies as they’re currently applied and then attend to activating or improving upon them as that assessment instructs.

Sarasota County is a great place to live. It can and should be so for even more of the hardworking people who call this community home but can’t afford to live here.

Jon Thaxton is the director of Community Investment at Gulf Coast Community Foundation, a former Sarasota County Commissioner and a lifelong resident of Sarasota County.