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A public data project to track and analyze the rental housing shortage across the country, highlighting where additional units are needed most.
Different studies define the shortage differently with the total number ranging from 1.7 million to 8 million, depending on the type of housing and population group they are focusing on. We restricted our study to the rental market, and looked at the state of housing from the overall national level to individual county-level statistics.
Despite the nearly one million unit surplus nationally, the map clearly points out a pattern: most surplus units are in locations where jobs are scarce and depopulation is common, whereas the densely-populated coastal and metro areas are facing an extreme shortage.
For the lowest-income groups (those earning under 50% AMI), the number of units missing to adequately house them is 7.9 million, nationally. These renter households feel the most acute socio-economic impacts of the shortage, and if left to market forces, they will be hard-pressed to find affordable housing units in the most economically viable areas.
With an uptick in new construction, ideally a trickle-down effect should ensure that when higher income households move into new housing, their vacated older units become available to lower-income households. However, this chain usually breaks before the lowest-income households benefit as these units are either rehabilitated into market-rate housing, are put to different use or simply abandoned.
