Rent Affordability Impacted By Population Shift

While recent gains in rent affordability is a welcome trend, Curbed's Patrick Sisson evaluates some of the noteworthy, underlying causes.

Good news in the nation’s battle for housing affordability—a decrease in the percentage of U.S. renters considered rent-burdened, defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing—may in part be shaded by the fact that an increasingly wealthy group of Americans have entered the rental population.

Those are a few of the observations drawn from the 2017 National Rental Housing Landscape, a report released this afternoon by the Furman Center at New York University. The report, which focused on data from 2012-2015, the recovery years of the recession, highlights the breadth of the affordability crisis, and the ways that imbalances in supply across the housing market are exerting cost pressures.

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