Who Are the People in Your Multifamily Housing Market?

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

As a journalist turned writing teacher turned Substacker, I work with words. This differs me from contributors here who work with loan agreements, client books, or hammers. But like those other specialists, I’ve been trying to digest the word “multifamily” in an era when family shapes and sizes vary. So I decided to look at fresh financing models for American apartments. I learned that all multifamily players should continually evaluate what households look like in their city and how apartment finance can change shape and size to fit them. 

As with home decor, formulas for multifamily innovation cover a wide range. And just as each apartment’s floor plan accommodates all sorts of lamps and beanbag chairs, each supply problem invites a range of assumptions about potential financing and demand. Furthermore, the burgeoning approach to introduce more types of apartments into the market expands the variety of housing options where families of all incomes and tastes can comfortably live. And that requires policymakers and developers with acute knowledge of who lives in their communities and what matters most to them. 

Policymakers and developers need to know their markets’ economics and demographics closely, because there is no longer such a thing as a “typical” household in America that looks similar across regions. For example, Atlanta-based Kronberg Architects + Urbanists presented a slide to the Congress for the New Urbanism showing that nearly a third of households consist of one person or couples with no kids. Nuclear families clock in at 18 percent, two percentage points ahead of adult roommates. Yet, in many cities, the options for these groups are sparse. How can policymakers tune incentives, and how can developers manage design, marketing, and price, to suit this hodgepodge of ‘family’ types? 

Some truths abide from the mid-twentieth century, when the definition of “family” in America mostly referred to the nuclear family. Everybody wants enough space to sleep in privacy, cook and eat, and move around in natural light, and some developers are building brands around serving those desires. Developers StreetLife Residential, for example, are betting on high-gloss, extensively designed towers, including meaningful shares of three-bedroom units in Dallas, Austin, Nashville, and elsewhere across the South. For this firm, “design is the business model,” and making three-bedrooms profitable means wooing families, who might otherwise leave cities, with pools and the like. 

The amenities-first-payoff-later play will work as long as both the management and the occupant can afford to maintain the pools, conference rooms, and wellness studios. At the end of the month, though, most Americans are stretched for cash—including building managers. So, some promising work involves suppressing the development cost of larger apartments. In Seattle, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer cofounded a charitable outfit that, among other things, offers forgivable loans to developers for complexes that include units of two bedrooms or more. The forgivable loans kick in when developers put projects together without public subsidies—in theory, “crowding in” private capital that would normally go to high-end projects. 

An example of this work is epitomized by the Pacific Northwest firm Great Expectations, which specializes in large affordable apartments like the 102-unit Addison Grove in Frederickson, about an hour south of Seattle. In a Seattle Times story on June 11 about a partnership with the charitable Ballmer Group, Great Expectations development head Alec Thomas (no relation!) labeled much standard large-apartment development as “cost-prohibitive” without supportive measures like the forgivable loans. 

If demand exists, policy levers can also stoke more supply. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2026 “State of the Nation’s Housing” report, housing demand and supply vary across the nation, but affordable housing is scarce everywhere. To encourage builders to provide more inventory, Florida, New Hampshire, and Texas moved last year to allow more multifamily development through relaxing restrictions on their presence in manufacturing zones. 

When policy allows more new construction, expertise in local demand becomes crucial. You can’t assume your market wants lots of big apartments. Megan Miles, Housing Policy Director for Chattanooga, spoke at a Shelterforce-sponsored webinar in July about uptake for a housing payment-in-lieu-of-tax program the city developed. In Tennessee, Miles said, some developers expected to provide three- and four-bedroom units. However, she reiterated: “Census data found a 14,000 person gap between one-person households and one-bedroom apartments.” She endorsed zoning reform to make development more flexible and customized to local markets. 

Sometimes, knowing what will fly in a local market means disregarding conventional wisdom. In my hometown of New York City, public school enrollment has dropped by double-digit percentage points since the COVID-19 lockdown, and many people know families who have left town. But in the mixed-income (albeit gentrifying) Gowanus neighborhood, not all builders got the memo on the demand for bigger apartments. A case study on the market-minded Thesis Driven site celebrates Charney Companies for analyzing competitors’ design and unit mix. The study says the developer reviewed nearby architectural plans and found a gap: “Only about three percent of existing supply consisted of three-bedroom units, while broader demand analysis pointed to absorption closer to 14 percent.” Families in many markets, it seems, would lap up large apartments if they could find them. 

If you’re addressing large-apartment supply and hoping to draw full-fare tenants, you and your city would indeed do well to focus on design. ThesisDriven editor-in-chief Brad Hargreaves’ priorities include more elevators, windowless bedrooms, and courtyard entry to fit larger units into a footprint. A design approach that could win families and support affordability focuses on courtyards. Scholar and advocate Alicia Pederson says that building attached rowhouses around an inner courtyard will enable developers—and cities—to attract and retain families who are now grudgingly moving to suburbia. 

Speaking to the Bay Area advocacy group SPUR via Zoom on July 29, Pederson said that buildings with single-stair construction, if residents can enter them at more than one door, allow for “unit diversity.” Even a single building with a shared courtyard is more valuable than a single-family product, she told SPUR. Pederson mentioned ongoing collaboration with partners in Albany, New York, civic groups in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, and major asset owners in Minneapolis and St. Louis to foster courtyard-block thinking for multi-use projects. 

An added selling point for apartment living involves energy savings: You drive less often to the park or the MonsterMart if your kids play in the yard and you shop at the corner store. In affordable contexts, early data from a massive Brooklyn project called Alafia suggest that energy savings become more critical because people use the apartments for more of the day than traditional energy models predict. Cities might track energy savings from new multifamily designs and adjust incentives or technologies. As I warned in my last The Rooftop essay, they may also want to oversee how property managers program courtyards and other shared spaces in an era of phone-fueled isolation. 

To know the local market is also to claim some moral authority there. Cities may want to deploy that moral authority in light of reporting that affluent Americans are buying bigger homes as their household sizes…shrink. Officials might nudge buyers toward some humility, maybe with an extra tax on unused bedrooms or an incentive or rebate to rent out those bedrooms. 

Sharp, optimistic ideas about housing the many kinds of families that make up America seem as plentiful as music tastes along an apartment-complex corridor. Leaders who stay current on who’s in their community and who wants to be there can balance design, unit mix, and incentives to make sure all kinds of families can keep their hopes and investments in the city. 

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.