It’s no secret that affordable housing is in short supply for Austinites. But a new report by the Austin Board of REALTORS looks to quantify how much harder the struggle to find affordable housing is for people of color in Austin.
This report comes on the heels of an earlier ABoR analysis, published in August, which found that the city is missing 211,000 homes affordable for four-person households earning $93,450 or less, which is 80% or less of the median family income (MFI).
More than half of four-person households in Travis County are in that income bracket, yet fewer than 5% of homes sold in the county in the first half of 2023 were affordable to Austinites in that group. That’s a glaring problem on its own, but ABoR’s new report shows affordable housing is even harder to find for Black and Latino Austinites.
ABoR calculated housing affordability across five different racial and ethnic groups by looking at the distribution of income for each group and the percentage of the total population represented by each group. So, the lower household incomes are for a group, the fewer affordable houses are available to them. Looking again at four-person households making $93,450 or less in the city, ABoR found that Black Austinite households face the largest percentage of undersupply, with a roughly 69% shortage in homes for Black Austinites. They also estimate a 63% shortage for Latino Austinites, compared to a shortage of about 40% for white and Asian households. Under- and oversupply also vary greatly across districts, with District 4 having the greatest need for less expensive housing.
“Homeownership remains the primary mechanism to build generational wealth.” – Clare Losey, ABoR housing economist
House-hunting in Austin can seem like finding a needle in a haystack, even for renters, but the stark imbalances in housing affordability among different races have longer-term impacts when looking at buyers. “Homeownership remains the primary mechanism to build generational wealth,” said Clare Losey, an ABoR housing economist.
Meanwhile, for Austinites making the median income or far above it, there is a vast oversupply of housing. For four-person households earning more than about $150,000 per year, there’s a 44% surplus of housing. That means a lot of empty houses, and lower-income families paying through the teeth for expensive housing each month.
So, how should the city of Austin fix this mess? Among other suggestions, ABoR recommends that they revisit the Austin Strategic Housing Blueprint, a plan formed by the city in 2017, which included the creation of 60,000 units of housing affordable to those making less than 80% MFI. As the ABoR report shows, 60,000 isn’t nearly enough by today’s standards – it would cover less than a third of the missing lower-income housing we need. ABoR says the city should regularly revisit the blueprint and make changes to reflect the current landscape. The city has made some progress on other fronts, such as their recent doing away with minimum parking requirements and their initiation of code amendments that would reduce minimum lot size and allow for up to three homes per residential lot (the HOME amendments). But they still have a long way to go.
“When we talk about housing affordability and accessibility, we are talking about all Central Texans, across all price points, being able to find housing near where they work and play, and at a price point that is affordable for their household income,” said Emily Chenevert, CEO of ABoR. “As a community, we must come together to take swift and bold action to change the trajectory of our housing market.”
This article appears in November 24 • 2023.