Hampton Roads Rent Report - February 2024

Norfolk released a new housing report. We’re launching a series on why building more housing alone won’t save us. And we’ve got new asking rents for Hampton Roads for February.

The total average asking rent across all units in February was $1,816 / month.

The breakdown for each unit type.

Studio: $1381
1 Bedroom: $1535
2 Bedrooms: $1738
3 Bedrooms: $2,263
4+ Bedrooms: $2,307

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City Breakdown

Norfolk’s New Housing Study‍

Norfolk just released a new study on rental housing in the city. If you have not yet read Ryan Murphy’s breakdown of the new report, you should do so immediately at WHRO. The “Comprehensive Housing Study and Strategic Plan,” compiled by real estate advisors HR&A, offers a 65-page dive into key demographics around Norfolk’s multifamily housing market. The report points to major pitfalls in Norfolk’s apartment housing landscape such as rising seas, “stagnant growth,” and “concentrated poverty which undermines the housing market.”

First of all, pointing to concentrated poverty as a reason for the lack of affordable housing is like pointing to a house fire as the reason for a gas leak.

But it is true, as the Daily Press wrote, that the “housing crisis does not stand in isolation from its other social problems.”

Setting that aside there’s one key highlight here:

The report identifies a significant lack of multifamily housing to accommodate families making under $35,000 a year.  In his presentation to City Council, HR&A consultant Phillip Kash noted Norfolk’s “greatest challenge” are the “households making $15 to $20 an hour.” Housing stock for this demographic is rapidly dwindling.  This tracks with further data that in the past ten years, Norfolk has lost close to 4,000 renter households making under $50,000 a year, but gained more than double that in renter households making over $50,000 a year.

‍The study gives some contour to the lack of affordable 1 bedroom apartments we’ve been writing about here for over a year now. New builds aren’t affordable. As the The Virginian-Pilot warns “Hampton Roads is staring into an affordable housing crisis…politics and economics have conspired to create an unofficial building moratorium on everything but luxury housing.” The same feeling was echoed by The New Journal and Guide that “the private sector overall has little interest in constructing millions of new housing units for people of modest means.”

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Missing the Point

The Daily Press article is from 1989, The New Journal and Guide article is from 1997, and the Pilot article is from 2004. You can flip all the way back to 1925 to find the Daily Press bemoaning “capital’s failure to solve the housing crisis.”

The report misses a fundamental point about multifamily housing: The drop in ‘affordable’ housing is not a signal of something gone wrong, that’s the housing market working just as it is supposed to. A market which jettisons the poor in favor of courting higher rents is a feature, not a bug, of the housing market.Norfolk’s housing market is working just as it has for decades.

Ricardo Tranjan puts it best in his new book The Tenant Class, “the purpose of the rental market is not to ensure the highest possible number of families is securely housed. The purpose of the rental market is to extract income from tenants.” And it’s doing a good job at this in Hampton Roads
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Solutions.

In his presentation to council, Kash noted that NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) opposition to housing is a major culprit for the lack of affordable apartments in Hampton Roads. The report argues for boosting the supply of housing to the tune of 250 units a year in order to ease pressure on Norfolk’s renters. The first part is probably true, NIMBY has killed housing deals. But there’s no guarantee that building more housing would heave led to lower rents.

This got us thinking. Why is the idea that building more housing will lower rents so popular? Why do we think of rent in terms of supply and demand, like milk? And how can we move beyond this idea?

Rather than cram all that into one rent report we’re going to launch a series. We will be bringing you a look at all the ways increasing the supply of housing -- from up-zoning to deregulation, from YIMBY to densification -- doesn't actually do much to lower rents.

After all, we don’t want to be bringing you a breakdown of the 2060 Comprehensive Housing Study that says Norfolk should “build more housing."
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Fund More Research

To Use This Map:
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This map shows the average rent prices across all housing units for rent in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
This data is updated monthly. If you find this data useful, please consider supporting CityWork by clicking the button below. Click on any of the neighborhoods to see the average rent price. On a mobile device, click the pop-up to see more information about that neighborhood.

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