Published March 8, 2016
By Kathleen Lynn

The share of people in the New York suburbs — including North Jersey — who rent, rather than own, their homes has risen since the financial crunch, according to a new study.

The study, by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and Capital One, found that 31 percent of households in suburban New York rented in 2014, up from 27 percent in 2006, before the 2007-2009 recession.

That reflects a rise in renter households nationwide over the past decade, as many people lost their homes to foreclosure. Others were unable to qualify for mortgages, or unwilling to buy homes after seeing housing values plummet. And as Millennials establish their own households in greater numbers, many are renting in urban areas close to mass transit, rather than buying in the suburbs.

All in all, that added up to 12 million more suburban renters nationwide in 2014 than in 2006. The number of rentals also rose during that time, but not enough to keep up with demand. Nationally, about 60 percent of new rentals were single-family homes — likely the result of housing distress as owners lost their homes. But single-family properties were a less significant factor in the New York metropolitan area, accounting for only 25 percent of new rentals.

The growing demand for rentals is changing the face of development in New Jersey. Last year, about 31,000 housing units were started in the state, up 10 percent from the previous year. Of those, more than two-thirds were multifamily units — a major shift from the single-family suburban development patterns that shaped much of the state’s character after World War II.

But most of the new units have been high-end, offering little help to households struggling to afford rents in New Jersey.

“It’s just really difficult to find an affordable place to rent,” said Staci Berger, CEO of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, an association of housing and development groups. Berger said that aside from the economic upheavals of the past decade, many people displaced by Superstorm Sandy are still living in rentals.

“We had a really tight rental market before Sandy, and that calamity caused demand to explode,” she said.

In all the metropolitan areas studied by NYU, tenants faced increasing challenges affording their homes.

“Most of the metro areas in this study saw rents increase faster than incomes, which meant that fewer and fewer units were affordable to the typical renter,” the study said.

Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @KathleenLynn3