In response to the growing concern around the availability of affordable rental housing, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) published a special report to help policymakers understand the nature and scope of the affordable rental housing market and explore ways to effectively address the market’s underlying supply-demand gap.
The report stresses that government policies need to support both construction and rehabilitation/preservation efforts, arguing that “increasing the supply of new or rehabilitated housing stock is the best long term economic mechanism for promoting affordability.” Point in case is this graph, which shows how much of the affordable rental housing today was the newly-constructed rental housing in the 1970s and 1980s.
Read the full report here.