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If we ever want to address poverty and inequality in America, we need to start with housing—most people’s greatest expense. A new report quantifies just how devastating our affordable housing shortage has become.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has issued its “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. The most remarkable findings: more than 36% of U.S. households are now renting, a level not seen in 50 years. The rental market is the tightest it’s been in three decades. Driven by the Great Recession, which pushed millions of people out of their homes and constrained the incomes of millions more, the rental market is now the tightest it’s been in three decades. And for those not in the top half of the income distribution, the economic burden of housing is growing ever more crippling.

On the renter side, the number of cost-burdened households rose by 3.6 million from 2008 to 2014, to 21.3 million. Even more troubling, the number with severe burdens (paying more than 50 percent of income for housing) jumped by 2.1 million to a record 11.4 million. The severely burdened share among the nation’s 9.6 million lowest-income renters (earning less than $15,000) is particularly high at 72 percent. In all but a small share of markets, at least half of lowest-income renters have severe housing cost burdens. While nearly universal among lowest-income households, cost burdens are rapidly spreading among moderate-income households as well, especially in higher-cost coastal markets.

These are the hard numbers on how acute the affordable housing shortage is for low-income renters:

Only one in four income-eligible renters receives assistance of any kind, leaving millions to try to find housing they can afford in the private market. But units affordable to lowest-income households are often already occupied by higher-income households. Indeed, the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that only 57 units were affordable and available for every 100 very low-income renters in 2014. The shortfall for extremely low income households (earning 30 percent or less of area median) is even more acute, with just 31 housing units affordable and available for every 100 of these renters.

Housing, like health care, is a need, rather than a want. We need a national plan for affordable housing. Without it, the poor will never be able to build any savings. How can they, when they’re paying more than half their income just to put a roof over their heads, and nearly 70% of them have no hope of finding an affordable apartment because they simply don’t exist?

This is not a problem that people can just “work their way out of” with diligence and good morals. If we define “extremely low income households” as the bottom 30% of earners in a given area, then by definition 30% of residents will always be in this group. And they will always need somewhere to live. This is a structural problem.

Build more housing.

[The full report]

