Housing Trust Group (HTG), an award-winning multifamily developer and one of the nation’s leading developers of affordable housing, announces that it delivered 670 affordable housing units in 2021 – a year that will most likely go down in history for recording the biggest jump in apartment rent prices ever.
National median rental prices increased 17.8 percent since the beginning of the year, but many regions saw rents climb even higher – like South Florida, where rents jumped an alarming 36 percent year over year.
By contrast, affordable housing communities like those that HTG develops and manages charge rents that are often a quarter or half of market rate rental communities, for residents that income-qualify (usually earning somewhere between 30 percent to 80 percent of Area Median Income (AMI).
Needless to say, these apartments fill up quickly; all of the communities HTG opened in 2021 – Oaks at Lakeside (Bradenton), Twin Lakes Estates II (Lakeland), Max’s Landing (Miami), Village View (Fort Lauderdale), Valencia Grove II (Eustis) and Lafayette Gardens (Tallahassee), and Father Marquess Barry Apartments (Miami) – were fully occupied upon opening and each with long waiting lists.
“While we are proud to have made a positive impact in the communities in which we delivered much-needed affordable housing this year, we are humbled by the sheer level of need across the country,” said Matthew A. Rieger, President and CEO of HTG. “Over the last two years, the affordable housing crisis in the United States has gone from bad to worse and we’re now facing a shortage of more than 7 million affordable apartments. Our sincere hope is that our leaders in Washington D.C. will utilize the opportunity to act with the Build Back Better bill and allocate significantly more resources to the financing and building of new affordable housing.”
In 2021, HTG also broke ground on three new affordable housing developments in Florida – Bryce Landing (Jacksonville), Shoreline Villas (Fort Walton Beach) and Park Ridge (Mulberry), closed on the purchase of two parcels of land in Texas that will be developed in 2022, and received approval for tax credits for a new development in Illinois, in addition to continuing construction on five other developments financed in 2020. HTG also submitted applications for low income housing tax credits (LIHTC) – the primary tool for subsidizing the cost of new affordable development – in five different states: Florida, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Arizona, winning numerous awards.
For more information on HTG, visit www.htgf.com.