The Census Bureau released a pile of 2023 data from the American Community Survey today. Some of it is kind of surprising. Unfortunately it's all by county, so the best I could do was an average of the ten biggest counties to get an overall sense of what things are like in urban America. The biggest counties are:
- Los Angeles
- Cook (Chicago)
- Harris (Houston)
- Maricopa (Phoenix)
- San Diego
- Orange
- Miami-Dade
- Dallas
- Kings (Brooklyn)
- Riverside
Here's the first extraction from the ACS data. It shows the share of households that spend more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage payments:
I was surprised by this. All I ever hear about housing is that rent burdens are going up, especially in big cities. But every single big county has seen a decline in rent burden since 2010. The small increase starting in 2020 is due solely to Dallas, Houston, and Brooklyn. The other counties are either flat or still decreasing.
Note that these are five-year rolling estimates, which smooth out the peaks and valleys. Single-year estimates would be noisier and show more dramatic changes. But five-year estimates are what the Census Bureau released today, so that's what you get.
NOTE: There's plenty more to come! I'll put up more ACS stuff throughout the day.
Is that "rent" or is it "rent or mortgage?" Paragraph above the chart says rent or mortgage, the paragraphs below use the word rent only.
It's combined, I think.
I would say, not snark-ily, that if we are going to do housing charts we might as well break down the segments.
1. Current homeowners who own (well, recent history shows that as long as this group does not have a ton (percentage wise) of adjustable rate mortgages this group is basically fine). The concern, if this group has one, would be limitations on downsizing (the house they want to downsize to is too expensive) or moving.
2. Current renters. Renters care about (a) their rent being raised inordinately, and (b) can they become a first time buyer. But I think first time buyers deserve their whole separate category.
3. First time renters. This would be interesting, because my experience has been that even without formal rent control, newly rentable apartments and houses are more expensive then the comparable house for an existing tenant.
4. First time buyers. This is really where all the noise is. If you want to compare the good old days this is the subcategory.
Finally, any chart which does not exclude existing homeowners is by default too optimistic. For existing homeowners who still work, odds are that their income rises over time while the cost of the house they own stays the same.
I agree. When you lump it all together, it's very hard to use it usefully. Most homeowners aren't looking to move anytime soon, and while we should care if people who are locked into a specific payment for up to 30 years are cost burdened, most people who own and aren't cost-burdened aren't going to become cost-burdened.
It's different for people entering ownership and for renters.
Separating the groups is a fine idea.
But your statement "any chart which does not exclude existing homeowners is by default too optimistic", doesn't make much sense.
It's important to be aware of housing coats for everyone, including existing homeowners.
It wouldn't make sense to exclude existing workers from wage data or existing products from inflation data. Seeing new hire wages and new product prices separately is useful, but including them in analysis is also very useful.
Oh, I see - you "smoothed" the chart with 5-year rolling averages so that it doesn't look as bad and matches your narrative?
Because all the one-year data points for the ACS sure show a much less rosy picture:
https://www.zillow.com/research/housing-choice-vouchers-3-34004/ (this is about 2022)
And in the 2023 data, focusing specifically on Millennials and Gen Z: https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2024-10-22-3-in-5-Gen-Z-renters-are-rent-burdened,-but-Millennials-had-it-worse
We younger generations are doing just fine though, amirite??
This report from Pew says the 2023 ACS had 27.1% of homeowners and 49.7% of renters reporting being cost-burdened (30%+ spent on housing payment). Yes, that's not just the biggest counties that you've separated out here, but it's not "just about Dallas, Houston, and Brooklyn." The price of housing, whether you rent or own, has skyrocketed EVERYWHERE that people actually want to live. As in any city. It used to just be the bigger cities, sure, but in the last 4-6 years, the cost jumps have hit even the smaller cities as well.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/
Edit: Just saw the headline of the post again in my RSS feed, after commenting. It pisses me off. It's so disingenuous. Pure hackery.
how is this disingenuous? It's a rolling average covering 40 million people in the US, including LA which is like the poster child of unaffordable housing?
even one of your own links with the 2023 data makes exactly the same point, i.e. that rent burden 10 years ago was slightly worse than it is right now.
Personally, I'm pretty shocked by this data, and I'm glad Kevin shared it.
Because he's:
1) using the top counties only
2) using 5-year rolling averages specifically to "smooth out" the data, which artificially lowers the spike at the end
3) the headline is "rent burdens have eased considerably since 2010", and while (a) "rent" is the technocratic term for "housing payment", most people don't know that, (b) is untrue.
4) he's doing all of the above specifically to advance his chosen narrative that Housing Is Fine, Akshully. He's being a hack about it.
The way Kevin has presented the above makes it appear that even in the top 10 counties, housing cost burden is better than it was 10 years ago for everybody, because those top 10 counties are the drivers of everything, don'tcha know?
The actual data since 2010 tells a different story, which Kevin refuses to acknowledge.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/housing-cost-burdens-climb-record-levels-again-2023
It is true that slightly fewer homeowning housholds are cost-burdened than in 2010, but not to the extent that Kevin is trying to depict with his chart massage. And more renter households are cost-burdened than in 2010.
JCHS is referring to the exact same data that Kevin is. I wonder who's correct? Pretty sure it's the actual housing experts and not Kevin's hackjob.
Kevin's chart shows 40% as the 2023 figure. Your link from Pew in your original post shows 31% as 2023 figure.
Yet you are complaining that Kevin is misleading us by presenting misleadingly positive figures.
You complain about Kevin, but admit that his general point is correct. What a whiner. Get a grip.
What a good reader we have here! Read it again, and read what Kevin wrote again (can you even read?). The numbers are not the same thing.
For fuck's sake man, grow a damn brain.
Kevin's chart includes renters and homeowners using the standard cost burdened measurement, but only for a handful of major cities.
The linked article uses the same measurement for the entire country and confirms the point Kevin is making.
The article provides more details on renters alone (excluding homewoners) including alternate cost burdened measurements for renters only. So these completely different statistics do show different results.
You should understand the data you link to before you throw a fit. Or not, whine on!
This is misleading. These particular counties appear to be both 1) less cost-burdened than the country as a whole, and 2) have a different trend than the country as a whole. For another graph on cost burden, consider:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/#:~:text=One%20commonly%20used%20(though%20also,of%20Housing%20and%20Urban%20Development.
And here is a comparision of rent and income over a longer time period.
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/census-income-rent-gap-grew-in-2018
But that would run counter to Kevin's preferred narrative to resolve his cognitive dissonance on the issue, and we can't have that.
Your link doesn't really change the narrative that Kevin is relaying. It actually supports his argument, although it presents more data and different types of data.
Your link shows a lower rate of cost burdened households (renters and homeowners at 31%) than does Kevin (40%) and it states that for renters alone, things have improved slightly over the last decade.
Kevin is presenting a graph showing both homeowners and renters. Therefore this statistic includes homeowners with no mortgage, and homeowners that refinanced when rates were low -- both groups far from the core of the concept of "cost burdened households".
The graph he shows has a decline from 46 - 40 percent, a 13% decline. In terms of temporal characteristics, the graph declines until 2020 and then flatlines.
In contrast, the numbers for renters declined less (53.4 to 51.8, a 3% decline). But more importantly, the decline bottomed out in 2019 and has increased about 10% since then. So both the change is greater and the temporal dynamics different.
Also, as is typical, he is picking a particularly bad year (2010) as his starting point. If you pick 2001 as the starting point, you can see that things have been consistently bad for nearly 20 years now.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/more-42-million-us-households-were-cost-burdened-2022
The CBPP data shows that the gap between income and housing opened up between 2000 and 2011, where it looks like it peaked. Since then, housing has gone up, but income has gone up as well, and the gap has narrowed a little. It's still a much worse picture than it was in 2000, but at least between 2011 and 2018, the problem didn't get any worse (and actually got a little better.)
It's still not great, at least based on that data. Sure, the gap stopped widening, but renters have been squeezed for the last 20 years.
30% → + ←
There's a lot of pain in that symbol.
I'm clearly remembering what Oprah was saying back around 1990, about how your housing should be one quarter of your budget. And it was doable ... then.
Some of this is likely do to people in these metros being pushed out to more affordable areas, thereby leaving behind a more affluent population. Take Dallas, for instance. If memory serves, only about a quarter of the Dallas CSA resides in Dallas county. And I wonder how many former Angelenos, OCers and San Diegans are now living in Texas, Nevada and Arizona. More than a few, I bet!