Archinect - News

Apartment construction remains at 50-year high in 2024

2024-08-12T17:15:00-04:00

This year will be the first year in U.S. history that more than 500,000 new apartments are constructed, according to a new analysis of the 2024 rental market from RentCafe.

The trend, which is anticipated to abate slightly in 2025, may again resurface by 2028 with exceptions remaining in markets such as Minneapolis and Houston.

Topping the list was the greater New York metro area with 32,935 new units despite the city having permitted its lowest number of new apartments since 2016 last year. Dallas followed closely in second place, with booming Austin, Texas, finishing a distant third. Housing efforts there have struggled to keep pace after demand began to rapidly increase in 2020.

Phoenix came in fourth on the list with 20,141 new units, giving a face to the effects of the construction loophole underpinning its population boom in the face of questions surrounding water scarcity. (Paradoxically, as RentCafe points out, “[a] shift towards sustainability could be one of the reasons...

Rental apartment construction in the U.S. is at a 50-year high

2023-09-07T13:03:00-04:00

New rental apartment construction in the United States is expected to top a 50-year high in 2023. According to a report by RentCafe, nearly 461,000 units are expected to be delivered across the U.S. this year, meaning that over the past three years, 1.2 million units will have been built and brought to the market.

According to RentCafe’s analysis of Yardi Matrix data, the number of deliveries is expected to remain high until 2025, at which point the impact of current economic uneasiness will filter through to construction.

The New York metro area leads the country in terms of apartment construction, with 33,000 units to be opened in 2023. Almost one-third of the apartments will be located in Brooklyn (9,825), followed by Queens (4,430) and Manhattan (3,770).

Beyond New York, the Dallas metro area is the second most active, with 23,659 new rental units to come to market. The Dallas metro area has seen the most new apartments opened over the last three years, at 76,660 units. Other st...

Miami was America’s most competitive rental market in 2022, according to new alarming

2022-12-28T17:50:00-05:00

[In] the last two years, looser regulations and the widespread adoption of remote working attracted even more people to settle in the Sunshine State. As a result, newcomers found themselves competing with those who were already hunting for apartments in the area, making Miami-Dade the hottest area for renting in the U.S.

Nationwide, an average of 14 people were said to be competing for each vacant apartment unit, which remained on the market for an average of 32 days. Miami-Dade County was joined by four other Florida rental markets in the top 20 despite adding a total of 34,000 new dwellings within the calendar year in what can be seen as a direct reflection of the state’s migration patterns since the start of the pandemic.

Rents in South Florida were reported to have increased by more than 24% between 2021 and 2022 to an average of $2,841, leading HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge in June to declare the area to be the “epicenter of the housing crisis in this country.”

“Florida’s not going down,” one local developer told WaPo in September. “I would be the first to tell you if we saw it. We get to see it on the front lines, just by the amount of people that walk into the sales center. … I just don’t see it changing.”

...

New York City projected to construct the most apartments nationwide in 2022

2022-08-26T14:08:00-04:00

According to a new report by apartment search website RentCafe, New York City is projected to deliver the most newly-built apartments in 2022, claiming the top position for the first time since 2018.

Despite pandemic-induced setbacks in the last two years, New York City is expected to provide a record 28,153 brand new rental apartments by the end of the year. This figure is out of the 420,000 new rental units projected to be completed this year nationwide. It is also nearly 50% higher than the number of apartments that were completed throughout the city in 2021.

Across the United States, the projected new rental units to be built this year represented a historic 50-year peak. According to RentCafe, this construction boom is driven by greater demand for apartments as renters hold off on purchasing homes due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

Previously on Archinect: America's largest cities have seen a spike in commercial and multifamily construction starts during fir...

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is getting into the housing market with a new startup

2022-08-16T18:49:00-04:00

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is once again making waves with the announcement of a new startup called Flow that’s being funded by early Airbnb investors Andreessen Horowitz and is promoting itself as a real estate startup that aims to revolutionize the residential housing industry.

The $350 million deal is said to be the largest in the Silicon Valley fund’s 13-year history and brings Flow’s initial evaluation to exactly $1 billion, a pittance when compared to the $47 billion figure WeWork received in 2019 thanks to SoftBank. The company’s operation will officially begin next year, according to the New York Times’ DealBook page, which first reported the news late Monday.

“We love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned," Marc Andreessen stated, referring to Neumann's well-documented past. “The successes and lessons are plenty.”

Neumann has repo...

The New York City Rent Guidelines Board approves the largest rent hikes in nearly a decade

2022-06-23T14:20:00-04:00

Roughly 2.4 million New York City tenants will face the biggest rent hikes they’ve seen in nearly a decade after the Rent Guidelines Board approved the increases in a split vote Tuesday night at Cooper Union.

The mayor-appointed nine-person panel, which determines rent adjustments for the approximately one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City, voted five to four to increase rents by 3.25% for one-year leases and 5% for two-year leases. The rates fall in the middle of ranges approved by the board in May, 2 and 4% for one-year leases and 4 and 6% for two-year leases. This represents a compromise as landlords sought even higher increases, arguing that building maintenance and insurance costs have soared. At the same time, many tenants pushed for rent freezes and rollbacks, noting the rising cost of living in New York City amidst pre-existing poor building conditions. And rising inflation has impacted both sides.

This is the first vote under Mayor Adams’ administration, exhibiting a departure from the approach of his predecessor. Throughout former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, the board kept rent increases at historic lows, with the highest annual increases at 1.5% on one-ye...

Are Airbnbs and ultramodern architecture killing the vibe in Joshua Tree, California?

2022-04-14T13:13:00-04:00

Tensions over visitors, some of whom will, inevitably, want to claim a piece of the desert themselves, has been a part of the area’s story for years. But as the pandemic has boosted Joshua Tree’s allure for travelers, transplants and investors, it has magnified old conflicts and created new conundrums.

Numbers of short-term rentals have doubled in Joshua Tree and the neighboring community of Yucca Valley, presenting an existential crisis to some of its inhabitants dismayed at the new boom in development to meet the demands of the market. Even the tree species that the town is named for is under threat by overdevelopment (or so says the Center for Biological Diversity, whose petition is currently under review by the California Fish and Game Commission.)

Part of the draw is the growing number of Instagram-friendly architectural showpieces that have been spun off into midcentury-inspired camp compounds and Disneyfied planned communities. A rental typology may be developing around the trend entirely, characterized by maximized space for lodgings, matte finishes, and materials like mirrored glass and corrugated steel. Their appeal is nevertheless lost on some local desert dwellers, ...

Manhattan rents approach pre-pandemic levels

2022-02-11T14:40:00-05:00

Rents in New York City approached all-time records last month as inventory grew increasingly scarce. The median rental in Manhattan cost $3,467 last month, according to the New York Post, which cited the latest report by appraisal firm Miller Samuel. That was up a little over 2 percent from $3,392 in December, but it represented a 23 percent spike from January 2021 — falling just $5 short of the January record set in 2020, when the median rental was $3,472 per month.

The median rental in Manhattan in January was just shy of the $3,540 peak in April 2020. Prices in Northwest Queens and Brooklyn also rose last month, up 28 percent and 11.1 percent year-over-year respectively. The Real Deal notes that the major force behind price growth in the housing market is the persistent shortage of listings, which has been seen in the city’s rental market. The number of rental listings in Manhattan has dipped 83.3 percent year-over-year in January.

The drive in housing demand can be attributed to decreases in Covid-19 cases, leading to workers returning to their offices. The return of in-person schooling is also a culprit.

New York City surpasses San Francisco as the country's most expensive rental market

2021-08-31T19:11:00-04:00

New York City has surpassed San Francisco as the most expensive apartment rental market in the country.

According to August rental data from Zumper, an apartment listing company, San Francisco has fallen behind New York in median one-bedroom rent, with New York at $2,810 and San Francisco at $2,800.

Image: Zumper

“This was unthinkable even two years ago,” reads the report. “In early 2019, median one-bedroom rent in San Francisco was more than $800 more than New York’s, but a combination of rising rent in the Big Apple and falling rent in the Bay Area caused the spread between rent in the two cities to slowly dwindle. In January 2020, the spread had fallen to $520.”

As detailed by Zumper, San Francisco and New York were two of the most impacted cities at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Renters in both cities relocated, leading to increased apartment vacancies and plummeting rental prices. By January 2021, median one-bedroom rent had fallen 23.4 percent in San Francisco relative...

A new housing type is coming to Chicago

2019-07-17T14:21:00-04:00

A new housing typology will be coming to the Chicago neighborhoods of West Humboldt Park and Bronzeville, where Perkins + Will architect Greg Tamborino will bring his independently-produced, competition-winning affordable housing designs to a pair of vacant lots.

Tamborino was recently announced as the winner of the Disruptive Design competition, a contest looking to "address the challenges associated with designing and building affordable, owner-occupied housing," according to competition organizers.

The homes feature accessible ramps leading to the first floor level, which has been designed to accommodate ADA guidelines. Image courtesy of Disruptive Design.

Tamborino's designs were selected from among 133 international competition entries, and bested proposals by competition finalists Joel Huffman and teammates Georgi Todorov and Petya Petrova.

Tamborino's designs stand out because of the home's adaptable qualities and thoughtfully composed organization, according to competition ...

The 'Tinder' for apartment swapping launches in the Netherlands

2018-01-23T15:06:00-05:00

Dutch social renters wanting to move to a new apartment can now use an app to swap houses with other renters. One precondition, both renters need to ‘like’ each other’s apartment to get a match. [...] Young renters with small apartments may swap with older residents who live in bigger apartments. In this way, the issue of scheefwonen (skew living — when people live in apartments that do not match their needs and desires) within the Dutch rental sector could be solved.

"After two apartments are matched, the users are introduced to each other, after which they have to find out if their rental agreements are compatible enough for the renters to swap house."

What these “pre-rent control” stats might reveal about SF's soaring housing costs

2016-05-17T18:48:00-04:00

OK, so this would mean the way to make San Francisco as affordable as (say) Portland would be to either cut everybody’s salary in half, or fire half of them, or allow the city’s population to rapidly grow about 50 percent, to about 1.2 million, while the number of housing units increased even faster.

In discussing San Francisco's rising housing costs over the years, journalist Michael Andersen re-emphasizes some points in this recent blogpost by a man named Eric Fischer, who took his own approach in analyzing the city's housing prices before 1979, when SF's rent-control rates began being recorded. While Fischer's method may not be perfect, Andersen argues that the findings could shed new light on San Francisco's housing market.

Man living in plywood "pod" in SF apartment told to knock it off by housing inspector

2016-04-14T13:00:00-04:00

[Berkowitz is now] offering custom pods for sale on Craigslist for people who want to make money with AirBnB or have their own subletters. [...] The Department of Building Inspection reached out ... confirming that the pods are illegal and a violation of housing, building, and fire safety codes. [...] "He would have to completely open it up or look at something different, such as a bed with a frame, with curtains, something that was open to the room." [...] "there are fire safety realities."

You may remember Peter Berkowitz's name from the not-an-April-Fools-Day post we made a couple weeks ago, reporting on the box freelance illustrator Berkowitz had constructed to live in his friends' apartment, at $400 a month. After the news took off, he had begun testing the waters in the rest of SF's bonkers housing market to construct more of these pods and sell them to others interested in curbing their rents. After hearing from the building inspector, he told Hoodline, "I was just trying to gauge interest from people nearby ... I am not moving forward with anything I outlined in that email."

Related SF-housing news:

A little reminder that U.S. rent affordability is at its worst, according to Zillow

2015-08-14T20:40:00-04:00

Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history. Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979...While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter.

Berlin approves rent cap law to curb its skyrocketing rents

2015-06-02T13:42:00-04:00

Berlin has become the first city in Germany in which rent-control legislation has come into force in a bid to put the breaks on some of the fastest rising rents in Europe. From Monday, landlords in the capital will be barred from increasing rents by more than 10% above the local average. Such controls were already in place for existing tenants but have now been extended to new contracts. “[...] the difference between the rent paid in existing contracts and new contracts is so high [...]”

Married Couples Take on Roomies to Adapt to Sky-High NY Rents

2015-04-10T14:43:00-04:00

Living with roommates is practically a rite of passage in New York City. It often begins with far too many people sharing too little space and ends with a move into an apartment of one’s own, or with that special someone. But with rents reaching new highs, single 20-somethings are not the only ones looking for someone with whom to share the rent. Couples are living with roommates even after they’ve tied the knot.

America's most expensive rental markets in 2014

2015-01-07T13:21:00-05:00

Rents continue to outpace incomes. In fact, Zillow just released data showing U.S. renters spent a combined $441 billion on housing in 2014. Perhaps surprisingly, the New York-Northern New Jersey metro didn’t top the list. San Jose was the highest, with renters paying on average $1,807 per month. Meanwhile, the 20th most expensive metro for renters was Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the average monthly payment in 2014 was $927.

Making Space for More Tech Firms in New York City

2014-08-28T13:47:00-04:00

As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants. An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...].

Related: Working out of the Box interview with Miguel McKelvey, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at WeWork.