Rent Crisis Looms In Fairfax As Wages, Housing Stock Stagnate: Report

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA – Renters in Fairfax County are struggling, a new report commissioned by the county finds.

According to the report, “Assessing Housing Needs in Fairfax County,” released April 30, rent has outpaced income for the past 10 years, and only the top 30% of earners in the Washington metro area are now to afford the average rent in the county, defining affordability as spending no more than 30% of your income on rent.

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Wages haven't kept pace with rents

Average wage increases every year amounted to 2% over the past decade in Fairfax County, though that average 2% gain includes several years where real incomes dropped, meaning households might have spent savings or accumulated debt. On the other hand, the average year-on-year rent increase during that period was 5 percent, leading to rents that are today 44 percent higher than they were in 2015.

At this point, households need to be bringing in about $100,000 a year to afford the average market rate rent of $2,500, the study found. The area median income is $98,000 for a family of four or $78,000 for a household of two. That means more than half of the county’s renters will find themselves cost-burdened or commuting from outside the county.

Lower-income households suffer the most. Among renters earning less than $75,000 per year, 87 percent spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent and utilities. More than half of those families are paying over 50 percent of their salaries on rent.

Most new jobs created can't cover area rents

However, the jobs the county is creating generate exactly those salaries. Fairfax County added 73,000 jobs from 2010 to 2025. Of the 5 fastest growing job categories of the past 10 years, three are categories with salaries too low to support a comfortable life in the county. Educators and libraries, the fastest-growing category, plus health care and support workers and transport workers and material movers, two more top-5 growth categories, all earn on average tens of thousands of dollars less than the $100,000 annual salary that would make the typical rent of any size apartment affordable.

Even two workers in the health care and transport workers categories would struggle to make enough to find affordable housing.

Housing being built is expensive, inadequate

The county is creating jobs at a faster rate than it is building housing. That’s one part of the problem. The other is that the housing being created doesn’t match the salaries being created. From 2010 to 2025, while the county added 73,000 jobs, it only built 25,000 homes. And the market only serves those making 80 percent or more of the area median income. For those making less than that, there’s a housing shortage.

The county considers itself short nearly 14,000 homes for households making about $60,000 a year or less.

Fairfax County is one of the highest-income counties in the United States, frequently assessed as among the top 5, which often include some of Fairfax’s neighbors. But the region has been hit hard by recent federal job and budget cuts as well as downturns in the tech sector. The number of unemployed people in the county increased by a third, according to a recent report, many of them specialized workers earning high salaries. There may be a number of reasons for the county to diversify its housing stock in the coming years.