Data Explorer: Rent Burden in the US
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to occasionally publish "data explorers." These would be interactive tools for looking at data in different places and times. At the bottom of this post is the first of these tools. It is an interactive map showing the prevalence of household rent burden, broken down by income bracket.
It is available for paid subscribers—sign up if you haven't already. I hope that these will be concretely useful for people engaged in housing advocacy, local governance, and research.
A renter household is cost burdened (or rent burdened) if they pay more than 30% of household income on rent; it is severely cost burdened if they pay more than 50%. In the last post, I shared a chart showing that the prevalence of rent burden has increased radically in the last 50 years.
Of course, it also varies geographically. The data explorer allows you to view rental cost burden down to "micro areas" of about 100,000 people. In some cases this might be several counties, in other cases it might be the neighborhood level; it all depends on the density.
This data comes from the American Community Survey (or ACS). Technically, these are Public Use Microdata Areas (or PUMAs), which are the smallest geographical unit which ACS provides, in order to provide anonymity to survey respondents.
As I have emphasized from the beginning, it is important to understand how this burden is distributed across incomes. To what extent do the poor bear the brunt of it? How poor? In this data explorer, you can view the level of rent burden across income quintiles in each region. The dollar amounts that define each income quintile are also shown, which helps to understand the local context.
We find, almost universally, that around 90% of households in the bottom 20% of incomes are rent burdened. Even more shocking is that severe rent burden is often upwards of 80%. That's four in five low-income households paying more than half their income in rent.
It is interesting to see how rent burden across the income spectrum varies by location. What's it like in Austin, in Madison, in Los Angeles, or in Poughkeepsie? Please let me know if you find any especially interesting comparisons, and I might highlight them in a future post.
