How many homes does Atlanta need for every family to have their own?
Atlanta has a housing problem, both for inventory and affordability. Real estate company Zillow reported the metro has a 63,000 housing unit gap.
Based on recent data from the U.S. Census, Channel 2 Action News reported there were nearly half a million homes that could be lived in but sat vacant across Georgia, with almost 180,000 in just the Atlanta metro area.
Additional reporting showed there were 35,300 empty housing units in just the city of Atlanta.
Even further, almost half of Atlanta is cost-burdened when it comes to housing, meaning they spend more than 30% of their paycheck on housing for rent or mortgages.
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Cost increases and burdened renters and homeowners have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, and after the end of the eviction moratorium, evictions rose too.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank reported more than 11,000 evictions had gone to court in just the month of May.
Zillow’s housing gap report said the lack of homes available or affordable has led to families doubling up when families who can’t afford to own or rent live in another home even if it’s a tight fit.
According to the real estate company, these are families earning $35,000 or less per year, making up 68% of the group of doubled-up households.
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The report continued, showing that as of 2021, the so-called missing homes across the U.S. had risen to about 8 million households, up from 3.7 million.
However, different analysts put that number at different levels.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition put the national number at 7.3 million, with only 34 homes for every 100 available for extremely low-income renter households in the state of Georgia.
NLIHC said that was a 213,289 unit deficit in Georgia and a 121,163 unit deficit for the Atlanta metro area.
As far as how many people are living in homes, Zillow said Atlanta had about 1.9 doubled-up families per unit available.
“The U.S. housing market is like a high-stakes version of the game musical chairs,” Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at Zillow, said in a statement. “There are simply not enough homes for millions of people. Unless we address the shortage of smaller, more affordable, starter-type homes, we risk leaving families without a seat — and it will only get worse over time.”
According to the real estate company, Atlanta had “a deficit of 63,467 homes, creating 133,929 missing households,” though the outlook wasn’t all bad.
Zillow reported that building was starting to catch up to need, though zoning laws may add complications, and urged policymakers to loosen restrictions as a way to boost supply and ease costs.
For now, the Zillow data showed that as of May, 39% of the Atlanta metro area was mortgage burdened when making a 10% down payment, while 29.3% was rent burdened, as far as typical monthly payments, and household median incomes.
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