Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies: Multifamily Starts Hit 30-year High of 470,000 Units in 2021

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies has released its annual report, The State of the Nation’s Housing 2022, available for download here. The report details and examines nationwide housing trends and their causes, this year predicting that record levels of multifamily construction starts will provide some relief for tenants facing historic-high rents. However, the report authors note, surging costs for necessities like food and gas will continue to put pressure on renter households. 

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  470,000 Multifamily Unit Starts: Multifamily starts reached a 30-year high of 470,000 units in 2021, and the rapid pace of production continued in early 2022, with starts totaling 124,000 units in the first quarter — the highest first-quarter reading in any year since 1986. Multifamily construction has now topped 350,000 units for eight straight years, after hitting that mark only twice in the previous quarter-century. 
  
  
• +25% Multifamily Permitting: After declining by about 2% in 2020, housing activity in core counties rebounded 17% in 2021, including a 25% jump in multifamily permitting.
  
  
• 15.4 Months to Complete: Impacted by global supply chain disruption, on average, multifamily structures took 2.1 months to start and 15.4 months to complete, on pace with the previous two years but also tied with the all-time high.
  
  
• 11.6% Rent Growth: Typical asking rent for new multifamily units stood at $1,740 per month in 2021, well above the $1,080 affordable to the median renter. After a brief dip in 2020, rent growth in the professionally managed segment hit a record 11.6% at the end of 2021 and remained at that pace in the first quarter of 2022. This was the largest year-over-year increase in two decades and more than three times the 3.2% average annual rise in the five years preceding the pandemic.

Download the full report at JCHS.Harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2022.