Homeowners and renters alike are struggling with housing costs and millions have been priced out of homeownership. Read our new State of the Nation's Housing report.
As housing rise, lower-income renters have less left over after paying for housing than ever before, and the number of cost-burdened renters has reached a record high of 22.4 million households.
“Rental deserts,” where less than 20 percent of the housing stock is renter-occupied, are overwhelmingly white and higher income, and the uneven availability of rental housing correlates with measures of segregation.
Joint Center for Housing Studies
of Harvard University
Our Center strives to improve equitable access to decent, affordable homes in thriving communities and conducts rigorous research to advance policy and practice.
Homeowners and renters across the US are struggling with high housing costs. On the for-sale side, millions of potential homebuyers have been priced out of the market by high home prices and interest rates, while the number of renters with cost burdens has hit an all-time high.
Restrictive zoning and NIMBY attitudes have left nearly a third of neighborhoods across the country with few options for renters. The concentration of rental housing in some neighborhoods and the exclusion of rental options from others reinforces enduring patterns of residential segregation by race and income. In this paper, we use the concept of rental deserts to highlight places that have few rental opportunities for households and define these as neighborhoods where rental units make up less than 20 percent of the housing stock.
Home prices rose at an unprecedented pace in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as interest rates fell to record lows, the large cohort of millennials aged increasingly into prime homebuying years, and the supply of housing available for purchase remained limited. Using county-level data from Zillow and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, this paper shows that home price growth was widespread across market types from March 2020 to March 2023, but increased most rapidly—rising by more than one-third—in rural counties, smaller metro areas, and the lower-density suburbs of large metro areas.
