Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income
Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.
Homelessness
Zillow’s Prediction of 2017 Homeless Numbers in Line With Actual Counts
Predictions of the 2017 point-in-time counts in 17 out of 25 metro areas were within the 99 percent predicted interval.
Rising Rents Mean Larger Homeless Population
It’s well documented that there’s a connection between escalating rents and growing numbers of people experiencing homelessness. With this new research, we quantify that effect in 25 major metro areas. We found that in four metros currently experiencing a crisis in homelessness — Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle – the relationship between rising rents and increased homelessness is particularly strong.
Combating Homelessness in New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Tampa
Rents are so high in New York that 'we see lot of families that already have one or two jobs and are still unable to make ends meet,' said Raysa Rodriguez, vice president of policy and planning for Women in Need.
Financial Hardship Is Widespread, Especially for Households Earning Less Than $40,000
Nearly a third (30.0 percent) of households nationwide – meaning about 73 million adults— report they are struggling or just getting by financially, according to data from the Federal Reserve Board’s recently released 2016 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). More than half (51.3 percent) say they do not have enough funds saved to cover three months of living expenses.
Matthew Desmond Q&A: Housing Insecurity Is a Problem We Need to ‘Out-Hate’
'We don’t need to outsmart this problem; we need to out-hate it. We need to figure out ways of investing more in housing, and we absolutely should, because without stable shelter, everything else falls apart. Whatever your issue is, whatever keeps you up at night, whatever cause you donate to, the lack of affordable housing is somewhere at the root of that cause.'
For Many Low-Income Renters, Even Low-End Apartments Aren’t Affordable
In the 25 largest metro areas in the country, people with low incomes pay far more than 30 percent for rent. Even markets that were not historically out of reach now take a large chunk of low-income renters’ dollars. In Houston, the median low-income earner spends 65.1 percent of her income on the median bottom-tier rent. In Tampa, it’s 59.1 percent. In Philadelphia, 57.3 percent.
Highlights From Research on Rents and Homelessness
We used statistical modeling to improve homeless population estimates, then created a framework for investigating how changes in rent would affect the size of the homeless population. Given that logistics and expenses prevent metros from conducting more counts of homeless populations each year, this research also offers a statistical way to generate hypothetical additional counts every year.
