With soaring real estate and housing prices in recent years, housing affordability rates hit a record high in 2022, with half of renters qualifying as “cost-burdened,” new research finds.
According to a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University published Thursday, there were a record 22.4 million households in which renters paid more than 30 percent of their income in 2022, which is the general standard for housing unaffordability employed by academics and the government. This is an increase of 3.2 percent since 2019, with 2 million more households being cost-burdened.
Of these households, half of them, or 12.1 million, were severely burdened, meaning that they were spending more than half of their incomes on rents.
The share of cost-burdened households rose most significantly among middle-income households with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $75,000, the research found. Households with incomes lower than $30,000, a group already disproportionately likely to face housing price burdens, also saw an increase, with 1.5 percent more households with unaffordable rates.
The rise in unaffordability is due to historic increases in housing prices in recent years in combination with decades-long wage stagnation. The research found that, while median rents rose by 21 percent between 2001 and 2022, adjusting for inflation, renters’ incomes rose by only 2 percent.
Households with incomes lower than $30,000 already struggle the most with paying higher proportions of their rents, and this combination has hit them hardest; the researchers found that this group’s median residual income after paying rent and other needs like utilities was a record low of only $310 a month, a decrease of 47 percent since 2001. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute says that, even in the most affordable areas, a single-person household needs $2,000 a month after housing for basic needs.
Meanwhile, homelessness has reached record heights, with evictions increasing after the early pandemic-era eviction moratorium expired in 2021 and states ran out of rental assistance funds; since then, few policies have been put in place to prevent further housing instability. As of January 2023, over 653,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the U.S., a record high — with 71,000 people driven into homelessness in just the past year.
Measures put in place in response to the pandemic had helped renters significantly, but now, with soaring housing costs, the “need for rental assistance remains greater than ever,” the report notes.
With expiring resources for housing, the “housing safety net is once again overwhelmed and underfunded,” Chris Herbert, managing director for the Joint Center for Housing Studies, said in a press release. “And while states and localities have acted to fill some of the gaps, a larger commitment from the federal government is required to expand housing supports and preserve and improve the existing affordable stock. Only then will the nation finally make a meaningful dent in the housing affordability crisis making life so difficult for millions of people.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.