The U.S. needs 4.3 million new apartments over the next 13 years just to meet projected demand, a total that includes the current shortfall of 600,000 units, according to a new report published by the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association.
The shortfall is largely a legacy of the late 2000s financial crisis and deep recession, when U.S. development ground almost to a halt, the report said.
Read MoreThe five states in the U.S. with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. Some of the bluest states in the country, not one red state on that list.
And at the core of that failure is the failure to build enough homes, full stop. Housing is fundamental. When you fail to provide it, that failure reverberates throughout society, it lays waste to all your other carefully laid policy plans and ideals. Few understand the ins and outs of America’s housing system or systems like Jenny Schuetz.
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Read MoreBy 2026, all new buildings and substantial renovations in D.C. will have to be net-zero construction, meaning they produce as much energy as they consume, under legislation passed unanimously by the D.C. Council Tuesday. The legislation, which also bans most natural gas use in new buildings, now heads to Mayor Muriel Bowser.
The net-zero building codes will cover all commercial buildings, condo and apartment buildings, as well as single family homes taller than three stories.
The bill also requires audits every three years, starting in 2029, to report what percentage of new buildings are complying with the net-zero requirements.
Read MoreThe state of the nationwide housing crisis shifted significantly in the mid 2000’s, moving from primarily a coastal issue to one dispersed throughout the U.S., according to a new report. The report from Up For Growth shows the U.S. fell short of meeting housing needs across the country by more than three million homes in 2019 – up from 1.6 million in 2012. During this seven-year period, forty-seven states and the nation’s capital saw an increase in underproduction, and another six states moved into the underproduction category.
Read MoreSan Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Washington have long failed to build enough housing to keep up with everyone trying to live there. And for nearly as long, other parts of the country have mostly been able to shrug off the housing shortage as a condition particular to big coastal cities.
But in the years leading up to the pandemic, that condition advanced around the country. What once seemed a blue-state coastal problem has increasingly become a national one, with consequences for the quality of life of American families, the health of the national economy and the politics of housing construction.
“It’s like the cancer was limited to certain parts of our economic body,” said Sam Khater, the chief economist at Freddie Mac. “And now it’s spreading.”
Read MoreOver the past few decades, developers grew accustomed to nothing but staunch opposition to dense affordable housing project proposals. Within the past 10 years, though, in some areas such as California, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland, Ore., a new YIMBY (Yes, In My Backyard) movement has sprung up to support affordable housing development. In fact, some of these advocates, often wearing t-shirts and buttons inscribed with the YIMBY slogan, show up at public hearings and city council meetings to express their view.
Some of those embracing YIMBYism lobby state legislatures to enact pro-housing initiatives. With so many people struggling to find a home or pay rent, it is perhaps no surprise that this grassroots movement has emerged.
Read MoreRising housing costs, combined with persistent inflation for basic necessities such as gas and food, have left more Americans newly homeless and millions more fearing they’ll soon lose their homes. Shelters across the country are reporting a sudden increase in numbers of people looking for help as they struggle to cover basics. Inflation has reached 40-year highs just as many vulnerable families are readjusting to life without a boost from government stimulus or protections to keep them from being evicted.
A rise in homelessness is the latest example of a recovery further separating the haves from the have nots. Soaring house prices have allowed existing homeowners to see their wealth balloon. Meanwhile, for a growing number of Americans, simply finding a place to spend the night is becoming more expensive and out of reach.
Read MoreAlexandria is currently experiencing an affordable housing crisis, and lost 14,300 (or 78%) affordable housing units between 2000 and 2022. Consequently, the city has pledged to produce or develop thousands of units to meet 2030 regional housing goal set by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
After public outcry over a rushed plan, the Alexandria Planning Commission deferred a city staff proposal to allow developers to build affordable housing into new apartment buildings up to 70 feet in height in areas where height limits are 45 feet or more. Planning Commission Chair Nathan Macek asked city staff to present a refined proposal to the community before reintroducing it to the Commission for review again.
Read MoreLocal residents, worried about losing affordable housing, have called for an anti-displacement policy to accompany the development, and tenant activists are demanding better renter protections. They highlighted the paradox of simply building more such safeguards, since adding more housing and businesses to accommodate the library would, in the end, only push them out. Activists demanded policy changes that would protect the current residents and were met with dismissal from Obama’s foundation and city government. But in 2019, to address the housing crisis his project worsened, the Obama Center finally supported a Community Benefits Agreement authored by a coalition of local organizations and activists.
Read MoreAffordable housing continues to fight negative stereotypes, generalizations, ill perceptions and the “Not in My Back Yard” (NIMBY) mindset that is causing extreme housing shortages across the country.
Two executives from Indianapolis-based KCG Companies offered actionable takeaways on how to counter the resistance and develop YIMBY — “Yes. In My Backyard” – during National Apartment Association’s Apartmentalize conference last week in San Diego.
Read MoreClearly, some neighborhoods more than others are supplying the hundreds of thousands of new affordable units needed to pull the city out of a profound affordable housing crisis. To some extent, the disproportionality is understandable: Land is simply cheaper in poorer neighborhoods, and they are often already zoned to accommodate big, blocky new affordable towers. Just walk around intensely urban East New York or the South Bronx, then stroll Queens’ picket-fence-y Middle Village or the Bronx’s Throggs Neck to understand that the first two neighborhoods are more amenable to colossal upzoning than the latter. When deeply affordable housing is proposed for neighborhoods other than the poorest, locals shout it down. Is the city ready to plow over the outrage?
Read MoreCities are fundamentally engines of economic growth. They are agglomerations of workers and industries that have discovered that they are more productive together than they are apart. Perversely, instead of planning for population growth in urban areas, many American state and local governments have done the opposite: They have worked to restrict and slow construction, believing that a thriving, economically successful city could remain stagnant. Affordable-housing production in Washington, D.C., provides a clear example. Whereas the wealthy neighborhoods of Rock Creek West are just 1 percent of the way toward their goals, less exclusive neighborhoods have seen their supply swell. The real villains in the tale of gentrification are not 20-something new entrants to mixed-income neighborhoods, but NIMBY homeowners in the wealthiest ones.
Read MoreDuring the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.
Read MoreSuburban homeowners like Susan Kirsch are often blamed for worsening the nation’s housing crisis. That doesn’t mean she’s giving up her two-decade fight against 20 condos.
Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden, she has an Amnesty International sticker on her front window and a photograph on her refrigerator of herself and hundreds of other people spelling “TAX THE 1%” on a beach.
The cause that takes up most of her time, however, is fighting new development and campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have near total control over what gets built in them.
Read MoreThere are more registered vehicles in California than there are adult human beings. This isn’t especially anomalous — vehicles outnumber people who can drive them in much of the United States — but the mismatch is particularly absurd in the nation’s most populous and most car-obsessed state, where people and cars have long been locked in a largely invisible battle for the same precious resource: places to park themselves.
For California’s people, the problem is acute. In part because of a longtime undersupply of new housing, California’s cities are some of America’s least affordable places to live; less than 25 percent of households can afford to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the state.
Housing for cars, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap — often, it’s free for the taking.
Read MoreHELEOS and Dance Loft tout their effort as an innovative solution to two problems with the same cause: the lack of arts spaces and affordable housing, both victims of D.C.’s rapidly rising rent. The plan would double Dance Loft on 14’s size to 19,000 square feet, including two theaters and four dance studios. One of those would face out onto the street, allowing passersby to observe dancers at work.
“It’s really vital to ensure that arts organizations can have permanent homes. And in doing that, it enlivens the community as a whole,” Movius said, adding that the city needs places where artists can practice or make art, in addition to the theaters and galleries where work is displayed. “The more of those spaces that disappear, the less of a grassroots arts culture D.C. will have.”
Read More“Arts organizations that buy their buildings are the ones that are ensured permanent sustainability,” she said, pointing to Dance Place in Brookland as an example. “The trend in D.C. has been that arts organizations that rent their facilities typically eventually close.” In the past decade, D.C. Dance Collective in Tenleytown and Flashpoint in Penn Quarter were among the latter.
That’s why, a few years ago, she jumped at the chance to buy the building where her organization rented dance space. Movius, a dancer and choreographer, opened the current 8,000-square foot facility in 2015, and learned in 2018 that her landlord would be selling the building.
Movius sought out local developers for help and ended up teaming up with HELEOS. In April 2021, they purchased the building with funding assistance from private philanthropists and the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities.
Read MoreA new study from the Urban Institute think tank indicates that in small, high-density cities like Alexandria, the opposite may be true.
Researchers found that those living within roughly one city block — or 1/16th of a mile — of a new affordable housing development will probably see a small, but statistically significant, increase in property value, thanks to their proximity.
Read MoreWith the average 30-year mortgage rate rising to 5%, home ownership may now be out of reach for millions more Americans. A special election Tuesday for a state Assembly seat in San Francisco largely centered around an increasingly potent issue in California: which candidate wants to build more housing. The race between two Democrats who describe themselves as progressives became something of a referendum on the Yimby movement, short for “yes in my backyard. Yimby activists in states such as California try to persuade Democrats that more construction is the best solution for homelessness and lack of affordable housing.
Read MoreA recent analysis by Porch, a home services platform, found that 61 percent of renters can’t afford to a buy a home in their city. High rents also make it difficult for tenants to save more to buy in the future. Double-digit rent increases in the past year make many renters long to lock in their housing costs by buying a home. But a recent analysis by Porch, a home services platform, found that 61 percent of renters can’t afford to a buy a home in their city. High rents also make it difficult for tenants to save more to buy in the future.
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