With Rent Increases Outpacing Wages, More Families Are Falling into Homelessness
Nationwide rent burden has hit an all-time high, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Learn how skyrocketing housing costs are fueling homelessness—and what you can do to protect yourself and your community before it’s too late.
“You have a full-time job. Where do you sleep?”
“I still sleep on the streets,” said Charlie, a homeless man engaged in an eye-opening interview with Invisible People.
“It doesn’t matter if you have two full-time jobs. It’s hard,” Charlie continued, acknowledging the need to pay for other things besides rent, such as food and transportation.
Charlie’s story is emblematic of a growing subgroup within the unsheltered community known as “working homeless” people. It is statistically proven that more than half of the homeless population is employed. Hence, screaming “Get a job!” from the window of your car when you see an unsheltered person at an intersection is not only cruel but also futile. The problem is not acquiring an occupation but rather the lack of housing affordability.
Rising Rental Rates Have Adversely Impacted More Than 22.4 million Renter Households.
Authors of a late January 2024 report claim that “climbing rents have propelled cost burdens to staggering new heights.” This is truly noteworthy, given that in 2022, the amount of US rent burden was already pretty staggering by most metrics, considering the number of cost-burdened renters included more than half of all American tenants.
It seemed then that the crisis couldn’t possibly get any worse. However, due to astronomical rent increases attributed to corporate greed and even AI-driven artificial inflation, things did get worse.
The report explains that the number of American tenants suffering from the burden of rent increased again, this time by 2 million more people over three years.
According to the Harvard researchers, some of the factors fueling the crisis include:
- A 30% decrease in year-over-year affordable housing construction
- An extended period of vastly increasing rental prices following the loss of pandemic-era aid and protections
- A sharp uptick in rent burden among middle-income earners, described as households making between $30,000 and $74,999 annually (It’s important to note that this middle-income bracket saw the most significant increase in rent burden over the past three years when compared to low and high income earning households)
- A shortage of 7.3 million affordable housing units
- A dire need for rental assistance combined with a lack of resources
- Aging rental stock giving way to unsafe structures
- Lack of protection from storms at a time when climate change is exacerbating weather conditions and more
Experts Call for More Affordable Housing to Address the Urgent Need
“What we’re seeing as the affordable housing crisis is getting worse,” explained the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Field Organizing, Sarah Saadian. “Renters, especially those who have the lowest incomes and who are the most marginalized, are continuing to face enormous barriers to affordable housing.”
“The major causes of the housing crisis are the gap between incomes and housing costs and the severe shortage of housing affordable to people with the lowest incomes,” Saadian continued. “Together, that means that there are 10,000,000 of the lowest income households that are paying at least half of their income on rent.”
“When they put so many of their financial resources toward housing, any sort of financial hiccup, any unexpected cost, could push them into homelessness. That’s why it’s really important that policymakers are responding to this crisis with urgency, but also with clarity about which proven solutions actually work, such as housing and services,” Saadian concluded.
As it stands, rental rates exceed median wages by four times the amount. Rent burden makes people more vulnerable to homelessness because it diminishes the potential savings renter households need to have on hand for emergencies.
The current data reflects a dire financial need for most, projecting that nearly half of all Americans cannot afford an emergency expense costing $1,000 or more. For families and individuals in this situation, homelessness is one disaster away from their front doors. How close, then, do you think it is to yours?
As Rent Burden Surges, So Does Homelessness
There is perhaps no better evidence that homelessness is a housing problem than the currently available data. The latest available studies show that homelessness is surging alongside rental rates, to the tune of approximately 71,000 more homeless people per year. If you or someone you know is saddled with rent burden and straddling the brink of homelessness, let your voice be heard among our legislators.
Tell Your Representatives to Draft Laws that Make Housing a Human Right
Homelessness isn’t only an affordable housing problem. It is also a human problem. Remind your local legislators that every human being should be entitled to a safe, permanent, and affordable home of an adequate size today.
