{"id":6073,"date":"2015-12-14T10:01:57","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T17:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealdaily.com\/?p=6073"},"modified":"2015-12-14T10:01:57","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T17:01:57","slug":"crisis-half-of-all-renters-cant-afford-rent-why-real-estate-pros-shouldnt-rejoice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/big-data\/crisis-half-of-all-renters-cant-afford-rent-why-real-estate-pros-shouldnt-rejoice\/","title":{"rendered":"Crisis: Half of all renters can’t afford rent (why real estate pros shouldn’t rejoice)"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a crisis mounting when the amount of rent starts to eclipse a mortgage in terms of what people are paying every month for suitable (or even unsuitable) housing. A recent nation-wide survey<\/a> spells it the roots of the problem: rents are increasing much faster than wages. Inflation-adjusted rents increased 7% from 2001-2014 while household incomes dropped 9%. At the same time, rising demand for rental units has pushed the national vacancy rate to a 30-year low, driving prices even higher.<\/p>\n

<\/i> Read also: Study says renters are being squeezed by rising house costs<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n

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Numbers don’t lie<\/h2>\n

What\u2019s scary, according to an article posted on money.cnn.com<\/a>, is that while low-income households are the most likely to have a hard time making ends meet, middle-income households<\/em> are\u00a0increasingly\u00a0struggling\u00a0to\u00a0make\u00a0rent.<\/p>\n

The number of burdened households with an income of $45,000-$74,999 jumped to 21% in 2014 from 12% in 2001.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many are cost burdened<\/h2>\n

There isn\u2019t necessarily a quick fix to this dilemma either. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies<\/a>, experts generally recommend keeping your housing costs around 30% of your monthly income. But the number of “cost-burdened” tenants, those who spend more than 30% of their income on rent, rose to 21.3 million people last year. <\/p>\n

And of that number, adds the JCHS, more than 26% are “severely cost burdened”\u00a0and spend more than half of their income to cover rent.<\/p>\n

Don’t rejoice just yet, Realtors<\/h2>\n

Most real estate professionals reading this may be tempted to use this as a talking point against renting (“it’s not affordable, owning is!”), but remember that as the economy vacillates, even homes for sale are falling out of the affordability range.<\/p>\n

What this report truly indicates is that housing, be it for sale or for rent, is taking up more of Americans’ paychecks, but those paychecks haven’t gotten bigger in nearly a decade. No budgeting or selecting different housing changes this fact, and we’re watching the economic indicators for signs of a change, but we aren’t seeing them.<\/p>\n

#RentingCrisis<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rent is increasing faster than wages, and slowly but surely eclipsing mortgage rates, leaving middle America struggling to make ends meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":335814,"featured_media":6004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[313,91],"tags":[726,334,725],"class_list":["post-6073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics","category-big-data","tag-crisis","tag-mortgage","tag-rent"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/11\/house-neighborhood-home-sal.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/335814"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6073"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6081,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6073\/revisions\/6081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}