The often-recommended rule of thumb when it comes to housing is to not hand over more than 30% of your gross income to a landlord or mortgage company and the accompanying utilities. In the United States, more renters than ever are surpassing that limit, further burdening a middle class beset by high inflation and interest rates, reports the Washington Post. Using data from the Census Bureau's 2022 American Community Survey, new research from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reveals that half of the country's renters are surpassing that 30% benchmark, earning themselves the designation of "cost burdened." The 22.4 million in this category as of 2022 number 2 million more than in 2019.
And more than half of that group—or about 12.1 million—claim housing costs that siphon off more than 50% of their income, a record for individuals with "severe" housing-expense burdens. Prices grew the fastest for middle-income earners, or those making between $30,000 and $74,999 annually, but low-income and high-income households didn't escape the increases. "It was astounding to see," Harvard researcher Whitney Airgood-Obrycki tells the New York Times. "Really broadly, across the income spectrum, it was getting worse for everyone."
There is a "glimmer of hope" for renters, says Airgood-Obrycki. There are increasing numbers of vacancies, and at least 1 million multifamily units, mostly geared toward renters, are in the works, per the National Association of Home Builders. The Harvard report also notes that, after spikes in 2021 and 2022, rent growth has "almost completely stopped," with that rate falling to 0.4% for professionally managed apartments in the fall of 2023; for context, rent growth hovered at just over 15% in early 2022.
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But rental asks are still up 19% over what they were before the pandemic began, according to Apartment List figures cited by the Times. And those caught in the "cost-burdened" cycle fear there's no respite on the horizon. "Will this ever end? Will it ever get better? Can I get out of this?" asks 29-year-old dad Alex Larraza, who puts almost half of his $55,000 salary toward rent and utilities in his duplex in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. He cites his college education and 11 years of military service, adding, "I never thought that someone who took all these steps would be struggling so much." (More rent stories.)
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