Major citys rents are falling but some residents wouldnt feel relief for over 450 years

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 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, eventual...