Is The Affordability Crisis a Byproduct of the Recession?

The narrative around the affordability crisis often goes something like this: the great recession spurred a significant increase in demand for rental housing, which in turn created a supply-demand imbalance that has led to today’s affordability crisis. Affordability, therefore, is a basic supply problem. While the latter is true, zoning politics stall apartment development, causing the supply-demand imbalance behind the affordability crisis.

“In California, we are producing housing at about 80,000 units per year, but it might as well be static,” Scott Choppin, founder and CEO of Urban Pacific Group of Cos., tells GlobeSt.com. “Relative to the demand increase, it is. We are extremely constrained, and we are extremely constrained because of zoning politics, which has existed since the mid-1960s. This has been an ongoing issue, but it is peaking.”

So, why is the recession so often credited as fueling the demand that led to a supply shortage? Demand for apartment units did increase after the recession, but the supply problem was already growing. “The recession changed the dynamics in the marketplace, but if you look break it down and look at the housing types that were produced and became oversupplied in the recession, it wasn’t apartments,” explains Chopping. “It was predominately houses and condos, specifically for-sale product, because that was where mortgages could be funded. If you look at the apartment market, we hit a low in apartment production in 1994. So, you have this short-term arc of change in the recession and then you have a really long arc of decreasing supply of high-density apartments.”

Since the recession, apartment construction has actually picked up to meet the demand that came out of the recession, but it hasn’t kept up because of zoning constraints. “We have slowly creeping back up in apartment housing production, but we have never gotten back up to where we were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1970s,” says Choppin. “The clamping down of apartment production is really where this affordability issue comes from. It is really around apartment rents.”

In the end, Choppin says the recession certainly had an impact on the affordability crisis and the apartment stock because demand increased, but it wasn’t the primary driver of the problem. :This problem existed before the recession, but no one was talking about it,” he says. “Or, the people that were talking about it were in the obscure affordable housing business. Now, it is becoming a mainstream conversation because the issue it getting worse.”