Over the past three years, rent costs have risen dramatically for Americans as inflation and housing constraints push expenses up, according to data from Harvard’s “America’s Rental Housing 2024″ report.
Renting unaffordability has reached an all-time high, with 22.4 million households spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, up by 2 million in just three years, canceling out increases in affordability seen in 2014 and 2019, according to the report from Harvard. The resulting increases in costs have raised the number of cost-burdened renters to 50%, up 3.2 percentage points since 2019.
The number of low-rent units, those below $600 a month, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 2.1 million since 2012, totaling just 7.2 million units in 2022, according to the report. The constriction in supply was especially pronounced from 2019 to 2022,…
