Residential rents have again declined across most of Chicago and suburban Cook County over the past year, with potential signs of stability emerging in lower-income regions of the city, according to a new study by DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies (IHS).

Nominal rental rates in Chicago overall declined 4 percent in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the beginning of 2009.  In suburban Cook, rents dropped roughly 7 percent during the same period, the IHS study found.  Rents in Chicago have steadily decreased since peaking in the fourth quarter of 2007.  Rents in suburban Cook peaked in the third quarter of 2008 and have fallen even more sharply than in the city since then, according to the IHS study. The number of empty apartments has also continued to increase in recent quarters with Chicago posting an overall vacancy rate of between 8 and 8.4 percent and suburban Cook roughly a half percentage point higher as of March 31, 2010.

The hardest-hit areas in the first quarter of 2010 were the North and Northwest Sides of Chicago, with respective rent declines of 7.2 percent and 7.8 percent from the prior year in annualized percentage terms.  The downtown market also showed a decline of 6.7 percent during that time period, the study found.

Rents have been most resilient on Chicago’s South and West Sides, areas where the residential and multi-family foreclosure crisis has been most severe in recent years.  The South Side showed a drop in rental rates of 3.7 percent in 2009 and again in the first quarter of 2010.  Rents on the West Side have actually increased 5.1 percent since the beginning of 2009, the survey found.

“It’s somewhat counterintuitive that rents in lower-income regions appear to be most resilient at this time,” said James D. Shilling, the Michael J. Horne chair in Real Estate Studies, and director of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul. “The number of families in those areas displaced by the foreclosure crisis and a general trending downward toward more affordable housing choices may have caused more people in those areas to seek opportunities in a shrinking pool of  rental housing which might explain the relative stability in rents there.”

In March, IHS released a study showing that owners of a significant number of Chicago’s multi-family apartment buildings were falling behind in their mortgage payment and at risk of falling into foreclosure.

The study, which can be found at http://bit.ly/bAOWBI, is part of a series of IHS reports designed to provide affordable housing practitioners, government housing agencies and community organizations with reliable and impartial data about the state of affordable rental housing in Cook County and guide collaborative efforts to save this housing.

IHS is a partner of The Preservation Compact, which was founded in 2007 to stimulate a more comprehensive approach to preserving the affordable rental housing stock in Cook County. Guided by the Urban Land Institute Chicago with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Preservation Compact partners, in addition to DePaul, include Local Initiatives Support Corp./Chicago, Chicago Community Loan Fund, Community Investment Corp., Center for Neighborhood Technology, Chicago Department of Community Development, Illinois Housing Development Authority, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Chicago Rehab Network, Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, Metropolitan Planning Council and the Cook County Assessor’s Office.

IHS is affiliated with the Real Estate Center at DePaul, which oversees two Preservation Compact programs: the Rental Housing Data Clearinghouse, maintained by Shilling and other DePaul researchers to produce studies on the region’s affordable rental housing using data from multiple sources, and The Preservation Compact Interagency Council, which is composed of federal, state, county and local agencies that develop preservation strategies using the data. More about IHS and its research can be found on its website, www.IHS.depaul.edu .