It's simple: No one has built multi-family rental housing in central Austin in years.
This isn't much of an exaggeration. Outside of the Triangle, and some student housing in West Campus and on the periphery of UT, just a tiny number of units have come on line since the beginning of 2001.
Take all of south Austin, zip 78704. The city demographer keeps stats on each multi-family project built in the city, dated by the date the site plan was filed. (Open "Third Quarter 2006 Report" in the link; "multi-family" in this data means more than four units.) Let's count all of the multi-family projects that (1) had site plans filed after January 1, 2001, and (2) were actually built (since people can't live in site plans.) There were only seven such projects in South Austin, with a total of only 167 units.
This 167, though, includes condos as well as apartments. Although the city data doesn't say whether a project is rental or condo, I know that four of these projects, with 135 units, are condos. This means South Austin has had (at most) a measly 32 multi-family rental units site-planned and built since the end of 2000.
For the sake of comparison, south Austin had 9,811 multi-family units, mostly rental, in 2000 -- and that's excluding the student housing around St. Ed's. (South Austin had 8,244 single family units.) I'm not sure when apartment-building slowed down in South Austin, but by January 1, 2001, it had come to a dead stop.
Take zips 78751 and 78752, which together cover most of central north Austin minus the UT area. Ignoring the Triangle, only fourteen multi-family rental units (units, not projects) have been site planned and built in these two zip codes since January 1, 2001.
Thanks to City data, we can pinpoint neighborhoods with zero multi-family construction between 2000 and 2005. (Download NPA_Comparative_Data.pdf) Here's a partial list: Allandale; Barton Hills; Bouldin; Brentwood; Dawson; Galindo; Hyde Park; Rosedale. Crestview, Hancock, Old West Austin, and Zilker added a trivial number during this period.
Perhaps you're thinking, "These are single-family neighborhoods; it's unreasonable to expect them to absorb multi-family." These neighborhoods, however, collectively had thousands of multi-family units on December 31, 2000. Hyde Park, for example, had 1,604 occupied multi-family units in 2000, roughly 45% of all of its housing units. Allandale had 658. Barton Hills, 2,797; Bouldin, 1,000; Brentwood, 1,698; Dawson, 619; Galindo, 742; and Rosedale, 562. None of these neighborhoods added a single multi-family unit to their total for years.
There's the culprit for the affordable housing shortage in central Austin.
Look, a fair number of units have to come on line every year just to maintain the status quo. Some multi-family units are lost every year due to fire. Or storm damage. Or deterioration. Or conversion to other uses. (I know three apartment complexes on or near South Lamar have gone condo in the last two years.)
Then we have to factor in surging demand. Austin's "urban core" added an estimated 20,000 people between 2000 and 2005. The City as a whole added roughly 50,000, and the metro area many, many more. That's a lot of people chasing scarce housing.
I know that most of the new stuff being built is expensive. But most of the new stuff is being built as mixed use on transit corridors. That kind of stuff is always going to be more expensive than, say, smaller complexes built in neighborhood interiors. One reason is that land is more expensive on busy commercial streets, where there are lots of competing uses, than in neighborhood interiors. Another is that it's just more expensive to build commercial-grade mixed use projects than standard apartment complexes. (Don't get me wrong -- the mixed use stuff is great. The more the better.)
I also know a lot of stuff is in the pipeline. Housing "in the pipeline" doesn't do any good for people looking for housing today. Anyway, when you empty out the condos, and the student housing in West Campus, and the high-end mixed-use projects downtown and on transit corridors, the pipeline's producing just a trickle.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that there's been no demand for new apartments in central Austin other than for high-profile mixed-use projects like the Triangle or student housing around UT.
I don't believe it, though. Take a look at the population growth. Consider that tens of thousands of apartment units have been built on Austin's outskirts since the beginning of 2001. Surely thousands of those tenants would prefer rental units in central Austin.
There's a more obvious explanation for the dearth of new apartment complexes: There's nowhere to build them in central Austin. That doesn't mean there's no space. There's plenty of space. There's just little land zoned MF aside from the transit corridors and the UT area. The small- to medium-size neighborhood apartment complex is a dinosaur, and the dinosaurs are dying off. If you consider which neighborhoods are listed above, you know why.
