Christina Lee, Head Photography Editor

The Bridgeport-New Haven area has the fourth most competitive rental market in the country, according to a study published by RentCafe in September and cited by the New York Times in a recent article.

The ranking comes amidst a deluge of complaints about housing affordability in the Elm City and pleas for the local government to help create more affordable units. 

“People see [the rating] and think that we’re the fourth most expensive market,” Kevin McCarthy, a retired policy analyst in the Connecticut legislature, said. “No, what they’re concerned about is affordability — ratio of housing costs and income — and that’s where the rub is here.”

Each city analyzed was scored on five different criteria: occupancy, days vacant, prospective renters applying for vacancies, renewal lease rates and the share of new supply of properties, according to Doug Ressler, a senior analyst who worked on the data analysis for the study. Researchers gathered rental data from property owners in 137 different cities. 

The Bridgeport-New Haven market was found to be hotter than the likes of New York City or Chicago, largely due to constraints on available housing supply. Bridgeport-New Haven climbed from 12th place in 2023 to fourth, rising from a score of 76.9 to 85.5, indicating a more competitive rental market.

Ressler said the research team is seeing similar rises across the country, largely because people are choosing to rent for longer and because there are less units entering the housing supply.

As a result of the competitive market, rent has gotten so high in New Haven that many tenants find themselves having to work two to three jobs to make their rent, CT Tenants Union President Hannah Srajer and Alders Theresa Morant and Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26 all said. 

“New Haven is one of the most expensive places to rent in the entire country,” Srajer said. “The rental market right now is increasingly corporatized, and more and more actors are raising rents and not putting any of the money that they’re extracting from our members, who are working two to three jobs to pay that rent, back into the property.”

Mayor Justin Elicker also attributed the competition to the lack of housing supply to meet demand. Without seeing DataCafe’s research analysis, however, he found it hard to believe that New Haven was a more challenging rental market than Boston or New York City.

Elicker said New Haven is doing its best to create supply to meet demand, citing the development of 2,000 new units in the last five years, with another 3,500 units in construction or about to begin construction. That figure, he said, doesn’t include another 1,000 to 2,500 units to be constructed at Church Street South.

However, despite city legislation that has promoted the construction of affordable housing units, experts told the News that the housing crisis is complicated and will take more to solve than the creation of more units. 

A tough housing market

New Haven’s current rent rates are the highest that New Haven Legal Assistance Association attorney Shelley White has ever seen. NHLAA represents low-income tenants facing eviction. 

“Very few of our clients have rents that are less than $1,500. Three years ago, that would have been the upper level for some people,” White said. “And [now] I see people evicted for $1,700, $1,800, and I’m shocked that they could ever pay it.” 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of turnover in the housing market, White explained. “Mom and pop landlords,” people who might live on the first floor of a building and rent out extra space, are ceding ownership to “corporate entities.” In order to justify rent increases, White said, these corporate landlords will do “cosmetic” repairs — new countertops, fresh paint and floor changes — instead of more substantive renovations. 

Rent increases are also rising by higher margins. In the past, a landlord might notify a tenant of a $50 or $100 rent increase, but now, White is seeing single increases up to $300. In 2023, tenants at Ocean Management’s Blake Street property were told their rents were going to rise 30 to 40 percent. 

White described the current rent crisis as a “vicious circle.” Due to rising rent, tenants are being forced to move out of units, many having lived there for decades. Tenants are typically not given much notice to find a new place, White said, and with the scarcity of housing, their next unit will likely cost even more than where they previously lived.

McCarthy, a former legislative policy analyst, pointed out that Yale upperclassmen and graduate students are competing with families. While Yale students or young working professionals can afford to split a unit four-ways, a family cannot. 

“Yale is not the villain here,” McCarthy clarified, “but Yale is part of this broader phenomenon.” 

That broader phenomenon, McCarthy said, includes a shortage of starter homes and a failure of housing production to match an increased number of households. He called the nationwide housing market, as well as that across most of the developed world, “broken.”

“Because housing supply hasn’t kept up with household formation, the rents go up, and folks who would normally be exiting the rental market stay in it for another 10 years,” McCarthy said. “This puts pressure on the entire market.”

Attempting to relieve pressure

A key focus and challenge throughout Elicker’s administration has been creating more housing. In the last five years, New Haven has added thousands of units and has thousands more in progress. The city has also been investing in more homeless shelters, including purchasing a Days Inn and converting it into a homeless shelter. 

However, housing activists continue to call on the city to create more affordable units and provide a diversity of resources to people experiencing homelessness. Most recently, the Unhoused Activist Community Team organized an encampment on the New Haven Green calling for New Haven to designate a piece of land that homeless individuals can use however they see fit. 

In January 2022, New Haven passed an inclusionary zoning law mandating that 40 percent of units in new developments must be affordable, Elicker said. 

The ordinance mandates that new or rehabilitated apartment buildings in certain areas of New Haven or on public land sold by the city to developers must set aside a certain percentage of units at rents affordable to tenants earning no more than 50 percent of the area median income — about $51,000 per year for a New Haven family of four. 

However, the New Haven Independent reported in June that the inclusionary zoning ordinance had not yet created a single reduced-rent unit, despite being codified for two and a half years.

“Good people, good intentions, [not] entirely good on understanding the housing market,” McCarthy said about the ordinance. 

White explained that the ordinance, while admirable, mostly serves to make housing affordable to people working higher-income jobs. The clients that she serves, many of whom work minimum-wage jobs, can only hope that the new units will alleviate some of the market pressure. 

This is because, as McCarthy explained, the median income of city residents does not match the regional average median income used to determine affordability. In New Haven, the regional median income is $110,400, according to the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, while the median income for residents in the city is “about half of that,” McCarthy said.

For people trying to secure affordable housing in this competitive rental market, the process can be “distressing” and “terrifying,” White said. 

The Archive, a new 166-unit complex on Chapel Street, opened in August, with studios starting at $2,049.