Rental Market Stresses: Impacts of the Great Recession on Affordability and Multifamily Lending

Despite record-high vacancy rates and falling rents in some areas, the Great Recession did little to halt the long-term erosion of rental housing affordability. Indeed, conditions took a turn for the worse in the past decade when renters were squeezed by lower real incomes and rising rents and energy costs. Between 2001 and 2009, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for gross rent (contract rent plus tenantpaid utilities) jumped from 41.2 percent to 48.7 percent. At the same time, the share of renters paying more than half their incomes for housing climbed from 20.7 percent to 26.1 percent, with fully 2 percentage points of this increase occurring between 2007 and 2009 alone. The growing share of cost-burdened renters is apparent in all of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country...