Despite the growing number of apartments in downtown Hartford, the region’s multifamily development scene remains firmly a suburban phenomenon.
A new report from Apartment List researchers shows the dramatic disparity between housing production in Hartford and its broader metro area showing only around 1 percent of the housing units OK’d across the region each year since 2014 were permitted in the city proper.
Researchers at the company analyzed building permit data from the Census Bureau for the nation’s 50 largest metro areas for the number of units OK’d per resident living there from 1990 to 2022.
Because the report used Census Bureau definitions for metro areas, its data on the Hartford metro includes both Hartford and Middlesex counties.
But overall, the Hartford metro area permits very few homes compared to other parts of the country.
Since 2008, the region’s towns and cities have issued building permits for around 1,500 homes or less in any year save 2016, when just over 2,000 units were approved for construction, generally evenly split between single-family and multifamily development. That’s around 1.1 new homes per person in the entire region save the boom year of 2016, when 1.71 units per person got the green light.
It’s also left Greater Hartford between dead last and third-to last for housing production per capita since 2013 among the 50 regions Apartment List analyzed. The multifamily permitting records seen in recent years have largely been driven by projects in other metros, like New Haven.
Sun Belt communities like Austin, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee and Raleigh, North Carolina consistently landed the top spots from 2017 to 2022, Apartment List’s report said, with as many as 11.2 multifamily units and 10.4 single-family units permitted per person in Austin in 2021 alone.
“The U.S. is currently in the throes of an ongoing housing affordability crisis, which has only grown more acute in the face of disruption caused by the pandemic. Increasing the nation’s housing supply is crucial to relieving the pressure of this crisis. While permitting activity for new multifamily housing units is currently stronger than it has been in decades, single-family construction continues to lag, keeping homeownership out of reach for many younger Americans looking for a starter home. And while many Sun Belt markets are doing a decent job of building enough new housing to keep pace with growth, the nation’s most expensive markets are continuing to severely underbuild,” wrote the company’s senior housing economist Chris Salviati and research associate Rob Warnock.
