By Charlene Crowell –
A new report on rental housing from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) makes clear why so many people are dissatisfied with the nation’s economy.
Released in late January and titled America’s Rental Housing 2024, the report documents how ever-rising rental costs are burdening people in every state of the country.
In 2022, a record high of 22.4 million cost-burdened renter households rose by two million families since 2019. Affordable housing should cost no more than 30% of total household income.
“Median rents have risen nearly continuously since 2001 in inflation-adjusted terms and are 21% higher as of 2022,” states JCHS. “Meanwhile, renters’ incomes have risen just 2% during the same period… Among cost-burdened households, 12.1 million had housing costs that consumed more than half of their income, an all-time high for severe burdens.”
At the same time, eviction filings have returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023 as relief measures expired. A record-setting 653,100 people were unhoused on a given night in January 2023, an increase of nearly 71,000 people in just one year. Once more, Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately impacted. Black people comprise just 13% of the US population but 37% of all unhoused people; while Latinos, making up less than 20% of the population, represent 28% of homeless people.
Ironically, according to the report, cost-burdened renters include people with full-time jobs with a span of incomes that some may find surprising.
While all income groups had increasing cost-burden rates from 2019 to 2022, middle-income renters making $45,000 to $74,999 saw their cost-burdened share rise the fastest, with a 5.4 percentage-point increase to 41%. Additionally, 8 million cost-burdened households were headed by a full-time, year-round worker.
Among the 14.6 million renter households…
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