America’s Rental Housing Report—One Year Later

Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2022 America’s Rental Housing Report outlined a red-hot rental market characterized by fast-rising prices and historically low vacancy rates. One year later, many of the same challenges remain, but the market may be nearing an inflection point, the Center says.

Affordability challenges worsened throughout 2022, though rents rose at a slower pace in the wake of a market correction. As more supply became available to cost-burdened renters, vacancy rates increased in the final quarter of the year, and cooler demand could keep that trend alive in 2023 as well.

The number of cost-burdened renters who pay more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent hit a 20-year high of 21.6 million households in 2021. This was a 1.2 million household increase over the 2019 pre-pandemic level and included a record 11.6 million households who were paying more than 50 percent of their incomes on housing. Cost burden rates also ticked up more than 2 percentage points to 49 percent, only slightly below the all-time peak set in 2011.

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