America’s housing crisis has a missing middle, and Peter Heller wants to fill it.
Heller, director of acquisitions at Baltimore-based ABR Capital Partners, has spent the past few years hunting for creative ways to house workers who earn too much for government-subsidized apartments but too little for the gleaming class A towers reshaping city skylines. It’s a demographic — households earning 60 to 120 percent of area median income — that Heller says represents the largest cohort of renters in the country, one institutional real estate has only recently begun to take seriously.
“Workforce housing is true market-rate housing,” Heller says, drawing a clear line between his target sector and government-assisted affordable housing, which comes with income verification requirements and public subsidies. “Capital ‘A’ affordable is a very different animal.”
The numbers behind that demand are stark. Roughly 75 percent of U.S. households cannot afford
