Zillow Market Trends found that waves of new residents are outpacing new housing stock in the most expensive U.S. rental markets.
Take Los Angeles, for example, where only 187 new housing units were added for every 1,000 new arrivals. In New York it was 383 per 1,000 newcomers, and in San Francisco, it was just 193.
“Low-income people have always had trouble finding affordable housing, but now as rents have gone up, that’s true of middle-income people as well,” says Christopher Herbert, managing director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.