Single-Family Rentals: A New Approach to Affordable Housing
The crisis in affordable housing in America is highlighted by the 11 million families—nearly 25 percent of all renter households—that spend over 50 percent of their income on rent. And while costs for homeowners have dropped over the past decade, costs for renters have increased. Shortly, growing demand will stress already-low vacancy rates and increase rents: a projected 59 percent of new households formed between 2010 and 2030 will be renters. We need to find ways to create and preserve more affordable housing units.
Single-family rentals, or SFRs, can be an important component of an affordable housing strategy, particularly if SFR practitioners can access the range of tools that are currently reserved solely for multifamily projects. In particular, nonprofits—and under the right conditions even for-profit firms—should be able to take advantage of the more favorable financing opportunities available to multifamily housing as long as the SFR firms keep a portion of the housing affordable.
