Rising Dallas apartment rates pinch renters

DALLAS – Average rents for new Dallas-area apartments are at an all-time high. A new apartment with less than 600 sf in the booming Uptown district will set you back almost $1,500 a month. That’s significantly more than what it costs to pay for an average-price North Texas home.

Higher apartment rents are coming at a time when median incomes are basically flat.

More than half of U.S. renters are now paying more than 30 percent of their income to keep a roof over their heads, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Escalating rental affordability problems come at a time when the share of Americans that rent has increased from 31 percent in 2004 to 35 percent in 2012.

In the Dallas area and other metro areas where there is an apartment building boom, the surge in construction is part of the reason overall rents are rising. In close-in locations in Oak Lawn, East Dallas and Oak Cliff, developers are knocking down older, less pricey apartments to put up top-of-the-market rental units. Almost all of the more than 23,000 DFW apartments in the development pipeline are aimed at high-income renters.

With DFW topping the country in job growth and thousands of workers moving to the area, apartment builders aren’t having any trouble filling those new units., however the supply of those who can afford the new product is not infinite.