Brian J O’Connor
Yahoo News
For the first time ever, the median rent in the U.S. topped $2,000 a month in June — and the increases show no sign of stopping.
Those rising rents mean that households representing a total of 8.5 million people were behind on their rent at the end of August, according to Census Bureau figures. And 3.8 million of those renters say they’re somewhat or very likely to be evicted in the next two months.
The combination of soaring inflation, the end of most eviction moratoriums and rental assistance payments and an extremely low vacancy rate has pushed rents up — and many renters out.
Rents up nearly 25% since before the pandemic
Since 2006, rents have risen faster than home prices, but at the same time, the shortage of available rental units has been steadily increasing since the Great Recession.
In the year before the pandemic, the country recorded a shortage of seven million affordable housing units for low-income renters, according to the Center for American Progress, creating a crisis that left just 37 affordable rental homes for every 100 low-income households looking to rent.
And the homes that are available are often still out of reach. Rent rates are up nearly 25% since before the pandemic, with an increase of 15% in just the past 12 months, according to the real estate tracking service Zillow.
Evictions are up, too, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In August, evictions were 52% above average in Tampa, 90% above average in Houston and 94% above average in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
While the federal government has distributed the bulk of pandemic-related rental assistance grants, some states and cities have been slow to make the money available to landlords on behalf of tenants who can’t pay their rent.
[…]
Via https://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-bureau-3-8-million-100000978.html
Yup. Even apartments cannot be built ANYWHERE in the US anymore that a single person making median wages can afford, not without subsidies. As for houses, that ship sailed 40 years ago.
That fact is just now starting to sink in to the collective consciousness. That and the understanding that immigration without any extra subsidized housing is what's driving rent and housing prices up.
It's a simple enough principle, if you can exclude unaffordable housing from the picture. If there are 100 housing units that households who make $50,000 a year can afford, and there are 100 such households, then all the households can have homes. If you let in 30 extra households, then either 30 households have to double up, move away or be homeless. Meanwhile, the desire of those 130 households to not have to the be the ones to double up, move away or be homeless drives up the prices of housing to the point that some households have to do one of those things.
Of course, there's no fixed boundary on prices of housing and incomes, and such, so it doesn't end up being quite so simple, but the problem is bad enough a lot of people are finally starting to get the idea.
I've been commenting on this on my facebook page and elsewhere for several years.