New Rental Housing Report Shows 'Alarming Trends' for Affordability

A new report on rental housing from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies says the supply of affordable housing is not meeting the demand from lower-income renters.

The America's Rental Housing 2017 report was released today, and JCHS senior research associate Jonathan Spader says, "Rents are continuing to grow faster than inflation. We still see relatively high shares of renters facing cost burdens." The report's findings show that approximately 47 percent of renters were considered cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their annual income on housing in 2016, per Realtor.com.

The white-hot rental market is beginning to wane. With fewer foreclosures driving homeowners into the rental market, there's been a slowdown in the growth of new renters. Vacancy rates are also likely to increase as builders plan to add more than 100,000 new apartments from mid-2017 through mid-2018, according to a recent Apartment List report. That's compared with about 80,000 new units in the prior 12 months.

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