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A rendering of the proposed apartment complex at 5545 Park Ave. in Fairfield.

A rendering of a planned apartment building near the Merritt Parkway in Fairfield.

The Trademark Fairfield apartments at 665 Commerce Drive.

Digital rendering of the 1401 Kings Highway mixed-use development that will bring 160 apartments and 22,000 square feet of retail space to Fairfield.

The Pine Tree apartment complex on April 4, 2018.

FAIRFIELD — While the pandemic has seen the price of houses skyrocket, often with bidding wars breaking out over homes, apartments are also seeing a corresponding rise in price, officials say.

A desirable location to live and raise a family, officials say Fairfield’s apartment market is quite competitive. The question of whether that market is affordable though, is a subject of debate.

Trey Bickers, a real estate salesperson with William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty, said the median price of a one-bedroom apartment in Fairfield right now is approximately $2,000 a month. A comittee member of the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce’s Fairfield Emerging Leaders Organization, he said the people who move into apartments in town are often young professionals such as himself.

Bickers said the age range of people renting has expanded, as people sell their homes because of the hot housing market, but are waiting to buy elsewhere.

“In my apartment building, it’s a new building, and they have people there who never would have imagined themselves in an apartment building again,” he said. “They needed to live somewhere, but they wanted to unload the house.”

Carol Martin, the executive director of Fairfield’s Housing Authority, said the price of apartments in town has grown to a level where it is locking out many people on the lower level of the income scale.

“The market has just been really crazy,” she said. “There’s a huge demand and there’s not enough supply.”

Both Bickers and Martin said they have seen an increase in the number of people looking for an apartment because the apartments they previously rented were in houses that were being sold to people who planned to live there.

“There are a lot of folks in Fairfield who want to stay in Fairfield because they have children,” Martin said. “Now they’re trying to find another apartment and are nowhere near the price range they need to be in.”

As Fairfield looks to build more affordable housing, but in a way not governed by state statute 8-30g, which allows developers to ignore certain local zoning rules if building affordable housing, officials say the apartment landscape has been changing.

The average costs of an apartment

Bicker said the median monthly cost of an apartment in town, from what he has seen, is approximately $2,000 — although it varies by location and condition. He noted that his rent is approximately $2,300.

“But that also includes utilities except for electric,” he said. “Most rentals in town don’t include that. Apartment buildings give you a little bit more as far as that’s concerned.”

Bickers said a lot of the newer apartment buildings have other benefits included such as gyms and rooftop grills, which renters get in return for their cost. But, he said, rent prices are up compared to where they were before the pandemic.

“Some things are up $500 a month, not necessarily just a one-bedroom, maybe $500 or more over the past couple years,” he said.

Bickers said rent varies depending on the part of town, adding rent in the north part of Fairfield is going to be a little bit less than the beach area.

“The closer you are to shopping, commuting, amenities and the beach, the rent is going to go up,” he said.

Martin said the housing authority runs a voucher program, which subsidizes housing costs for people with low incomes. She said the vouchers allow the families she serves to be more competitive in the housing market, but the program has especially competitive since the pandemic started.

The vouchers come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which set the amount their worth based on payment standards recommended to them by local housing authorities. Martin said they requested an increase of 150 percent, but noted HUD gave them 120 percent.

“If HUD regulates, that, and your market, like here in Fairfield, goes way above what those ceiling limits are that HUD sets, you basically have a piece that you can’t use,” she said.

Martin said her organization has asked HUD to raise that ceiling in light of growing costs. She said they use a master listing service, which shows housing and apartment stock in any given area, to assess what the average costs of housing are.

In 2021, Martin said, the authority requested a payment standard of $1,815 for a studio apartment, $2,190 for a one-bedroom and $2,745 for a two-bedroom.

Notably, those figures are not the cost of rent, Martin said, but the maximum amount of subsidy HUD would contribute. She said people in the voucher program pay 30 percent of their gross adjusted income. Therefore, she said, if a landlord accepted an applicant with a voucher, the most they could charge is that number plus the 30 percent.

The actual average costs of apartments in Fairfield, Martin said, are her payment standards plus hundreds of dollars.

Martin said the payment standard data she was referencing was based on the zip code of her office, which is in the east side of town. She said the figures for places like the beach area or Southport are even higher.

Of course, Martin said, a landlord could charge any price for the apartment, but if they charged more it would lock out a certain segment of the population.

The authority opened up the wait list for its housing choice voucher program for two weeks in the summer of 2020 — the height of the pandemic.

“In two weeks, we got 7,600 pieces of paper for folks looking for housing,” she said. “If we were accepting it with people being able to do it from their phone, we would have gotten four times the amount.”

Martin said 250 applications were accepted for the wait list, adding that corresponds to the amount of vouchers the authority thinks it can put on the street in the next six or seven years. She said families with vouchers are having trouble leasing up apartments.

Fairfield has become largely unaffordable for people of lower income, Martin said, adding that pre-COVID, it had a more robust rental market. But, she said, the pandemic has led to more people moving away from New York into Fairfield County, driving prices up.

“That supply shrunk up, so what happened to the rentals that were remaining?” she said. “Well, it’s your classic economics. The people that are still landlords looking to rent are increasing the rent because they can. The market will pay it.”

Martin said the rising costs means that people like the working middle class cannot afford to live where they are employed.

“They’re having a hard time finding an affordable rent in town,” she said, adding the pandemic has sort of ended the robust rental market. “We are getting to be like Trumbull and Weston and Easton and Westport. Our rental market is shrinking.”

Bickers said most of the people he sees renting are young working professionals, which he considers a good thing as they might decide to buy a house in town. He said they generally come into town to be in a beach community with good schools, while still being in proximity to New York City.

Fairfield exists as a sort of middle ground in terms of rent in the area, Bickers said, adding it is lower compared to Westport but higher compared to Bridgeport.

When developers go through the process of applying to build apartment buildings, they often say the project would provide housing for Fairfield’s workforce, such as its teachers and police officers. Officials say many members of those professions can and do live in Fairfield.

Bob Smoler, president of the Fairfield Education Association, said more teachers live in Fairfield than any other town in the state, adding that a third of Fairfield’s teachers live in town.

“You probably have a thousand educators overall that live in Fairfield,” he said. “It’s about 300 something that work and live in Fairfield, but there’s 120 teachers who live in Fairfield but work in Westport and another bunch that work in Trumbull.”

Smoler said Fairfield has a unique characteristic of being both affordable and having a good school system. He said it is largely affordable for teachers, although he is not sure how many of them are renting.

“A lot of teachers have their homes in Fairfield — houses,” he said.

Fairfield police Lt. Mike Paris said traditionally, officers of the Fairfield Police Department have lived outside of the town, but he could not say for certain that it was because of affordability.

“Most recently, we have seen new officers rent in town for convenience, but it is kind of split down the middle,” he said. “I have not heard anyone specifically say that they cannot afford the rent in town.”