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Dallas–Fort Worth, TX, has spent years adding apartments at a pace that’s pushed rents down 2.9% from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com data.
But a new analysis suggests that it would take an estimated 474 years for that same relief to reach its most cost-burdened residents.
That’s nearly three times the comparable estimate of 169 years for the New York City metro area.
Big Apple rents, meanwhile, were up more than 6% from a year earlier.
Those counterintuitive findings come from the new Housing Affordability Toolkit from the National Multifamily Housing Council and NYU Urban Lab, a sweeping new policy resource designed to help cities address the nation’s rental housing affordability crisis.
The contrast is not an argument that New York City has solved its housing crisis—it clearly has not.
But it gets at a piece of the affordability debate that often gets lost inside bigger conversations about rent growth and housing supply: whether the homes being built can ever reach renters whose incomes are too low to support market rent.
In the words of Caitlin Sugrue Walter, NMHC’s senior vice president of research and innovation, “The data make clear that the rental affordability crisis is not one problem—it’s several, each requiring its own set of tools.”
Or, as the examples of Dallas and New York City show, a city can build enough apartments to bring asking rents down without solving the housing crisis for those most in need of relief.
The oxymoron of ‘affordable housing’
The report points to several issues holding back the development of affordable rental housing, all of them rooted in the same problem: These projects are expensive to build, but often generate too little income to support themselves.
Consider a standard apartment development. A project is generally deemed viable when the rent it can collect is high enough to cover acquisition, construction, financing, and operating costs.
Add more of those units, and renters have more options, which slows rent growth and, eventually, pulls asking rents down—that’s essentially the thesis that Dallas has proved works.
But deeply affordable housing starts with a different equation.
These projects often operate under restricted rent structures, which can leave net operating income too low for the deal to pencil out on its own.
Less income means less debt the project can support, and that difference has to be filled through tax credits, public capital, below-market loans, tax abatements, project-based rental assistance, vouchers, and operating subsidies—each solution more onerous, time-consuming, and costly than the last.
One analysis suggests that these types of projects can be as much as twice as expensive to build as a typical market-rate project due to the added costs of closing the financing gap.
Another gives these projects the dubious description of “Affordable Housing Is an Oxymoron.”
However you slice it, the cost reality for developers has depressed the supply of these units.
The report estimates that subsidized affordable homes account for about 14.3% of occupied rental housing nationwide, while even high-production years have produced fewer than 200,000 new subsidized units.
Despite those barriers, there is no shortage of need.
“The numbers are too big to spin,” Matthew Kwatinetz, clinical associate professor at NYU SPS Schack, director of the NYU Urban Lab, and Toolkit author, said. There are “22.4 million rent-burdened households, 10.1 million households that can’t even afford to pay utility costs.”
Why New York City has a shorter clock
For his part, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put those renters at the center of his housing plan—even as the city faces its own century-and-a-half timeline to close the affordable housing gap.
That commitment was on display this week, when Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin reached a last-minute budget agreement that included a new $175 million rental-assistance program for New Yorkers at risk of eviction or homelessness.
“We accelerated the affordability agenda by investing in housing, mental health services, parks, libraries, and students of all ages,” Mamdani said in announcing the deal. “This agreement proves that fiscal responsibility and public excellence can go hand in hand.”
His broader Block by Block plan makes the same premise explicit, while also highlighting the infrastructure required to move these apartments from idea to reality: a robust subsidy system, a large public-housing authority, rental assistance, tax abatements, and preservation programs that can keep lower-cost homes from disappearing.
But the toolkit suggests New York City’s affordability problems are bigger than any one program can address.
In that sense, New York City is the near mirror image of Dallas.
The city has more of the machinery needed to close the gap, but it is trying to make that machinery work in one of the country’s most expensive and constrained housing markets.
The problem is bigger than Dallas and New York City
New York City is far from alone. Perhaps the most striking part of the toolkit’s metro rankings is how widely the timelines vary by city—and how often fast-growing, lower-cost markets still fall into the same century-plus category as the Big Apple.
Only 13 metros in the ranking could close their affordable housing gaps in less than a century at their current pace.
Every other metro in the report’s ranking faces an estimated wait of at least 100 years.
In rapidly growing markets such as Phoenix, Miami, Jacksonville, FL, Orlando, FL, and Houston, those timelines stretch from more than two centuries to more than five.
The report also found that 38 of the country’s 50 largest metros had average two-bedroom rents above their affordability threshold and failed the test for new naturally occurring affordable housing.
In other words, many cities are not only failing to add enough subsidized housing—they also are no longer producing much unsubsidized housing that lower-income renters can realistically afford.
It’s a clear illustration of how the timeline to address those needs is shaped by far more than rents alone: the size of the rent-burdened population, the pace of subsidized-housing production, development costs, and whether local governments have systems in place to preserve older low-cost homes, layer subsidies, and make new projects feasible.
What happens when there is nowhere cheaper to go?
The case for closing this gap extends beyond the fact that the most cost-burdened renters need a place to live.
Pressure at the bottom of the market pushes upward, raising the cost and competition for everyone relying on the next cheapest apartment.
The toolkit breaks this powder keg of demand as follows: Of the country’s 22.4 million rent-burdened households, about 4.3 million households could benefit from more market-rate supply, 10.1 million more have incomes too low for the private market to serve on its own and are subsidy-dependent, and roughly 8 million more households fall somewhere in between—too burdened for the market as it exists, but not necessarily served by deep subsidy.
When cities fail to build or preserve homes, these households compete for the same older, lower-cost apartments that moderate-income renters also rely on.
And that supply is already shrinking: The report notes that the U.S. lost more than 500,000 low-rent units between 2019 and 2022, or more than 150,000 a year—more than the average annual production of new Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program rental homes during that period.
English (US)