New Apartment Building Lagging
New apartment complexes in Austin are getting harder to find. Photo by Reshma Kirpalani for KUT News and ReportingTexas.comAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Apartment hunting in Austin can be a challenge at the best of times, but new apartment construction isn’t matching the pace of the area’s population increase. Cody Lyon writes about this tightening apartment market in this week’s Austin Business Journal. He tells KUT’s Ian Crawford that 30,000 people moved to the area over the past year but few apartments have been built for them.
A lot of young people, people just starting out that are just starting new jobs and that sort of thing, can’t get credit in order to buy a home. So a lot of those people are pushed over into the rental market. … At the same time, developers have been unable to get traditional financing in order to build new products. And so we’ve got this really increased demand yet very little product to meet it.
You can hear the rest of the interview by clicking the audio player above.
