For most Dallas residents, a $1,700 monthly payment would not be considered affordable housing, he said. Certain renters are especially struggling to get by. Nearly 75% of single parents with children in Dallas are considered cost-burdened, and the same is true for more than 50% of senior renters, Tony said.
The aforementioned interactive map shows the highest demand for “Dallas’ urban core, ZIP codes located along busy transportation corridors, and zip codes with larger amounts of jobs,” Tony said. A limited amount of multifamily housing is available within these ZIP codes.
“Dallas must consider how we can make more housing available across the city of Dallas, so renters can have more options outside the urban core,” he said. “Unfortunately, 86% of Dallas’ land is zoned for single-family, detached housing, making it difficult for households to find rental opportunities when homeownership is so far out of reach.
“A family of four would have to earn $135,000 a year to afford the average price of a home in Dallas, $405,000,” he continued.
A Rent.com report from earlier this year found that Dallas is the third-priciest metro area in the South, after Nashville and Austin. The median rent at the time for Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington was $145 higher than the national median cost.
There’s a large gap between housing supply and demand for Dallas’ lowest-income renters, or households making at or below 50% of area median income, said Ashley Flores, senior director of the Child Poverty Action Lab. By 2030, this disparity is expected to climb by an additional 50,000 rental units to a supply gap of around 83,500.
Rent increases started to accelerate once the pandemic began, according to a detailed CPAL report released earlier this year. Wages have grown a bit, but not enough to keep up with rising rents. And higher-income folks who would have normally entered homeownership by now are instead remaining renters, putting “pressure on the rental market.”
Paying $1,700 in rent is still far out of reach for many people, particularly given that the DFW area has a high prevalence of low-wage jobs, Flores said. She also posed a relevant hypothetical: “Yes, this is sort of the average [national] rent, but who is able to afford it?”
