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Just Released: Rental Market Dynamics: Is Affordable Housing for the Poor an Endangered Species?

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A new study commissioned by HUD's Office of
Policy Development and Research (PD&R) explores rental
market dynamics and the loss of rental housing.

"Rental Market Dynamics: Is Affordable Housing for the
Poor an Endangered Species?" builds on a previously
conducted report and analyzes rental market data between
1995 and 1999 to examine the substantial movement of
housing into and out of the rental stock.

This study uses American Housing Survey (AHS) data to
examine the shifting supply of rental housing stock in
six metropolitan areas: Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles,
New York, Philadelphia, and Northern New Jersey over the
years 1995-1999. It tracks the sources of new rental
housing, the reasons for loss of rental housing, and
changes in affordability of the existing rental housing
stock.

Changes in the tenure of a unit (for example, from rental
to owner-occupied) were also explored in this study. The
authors found that extremely low-rent units were the most
likely to be either lost from the stock or otherwise
unavailable for analysis. Only 70.3 percent of the units
that were available for rental to extremely low income
people were still rental units 4 years later. The
remaining 30 percent of units were either vacant,
permanently lost, converted to owner-occupied, or
underwent mergers.  These movements into and out of the
rental stock can have an impact on housing policy.

Finally, this paper looks at shifts in affordability
among units that were rented in both 1995 and 1999. The
authors found a net gain in rental stock affordable to
lower-income renters, where much of the gain came from
the availability of formerly non-market units, as well as
a filtering-down of previously higher rent units. All
income strata with the exception of very high-income
renters benefited from this filtering down of units.

"Rental Market Dynamics: Is Affordable Housing for the
Poor an Endangered Species?" is available for download
from HUD USER at
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahs.html
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