In the Media

Half of all renters in the U.S. were burdened by the cost of their rent in 2022, a report released by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies this week found.

As unsheltered homelessness has boomed, the number of cost-burdened renter households has hit a record high, amounting to 22.4 million in 2022, according to a new report on U.S. rental housing from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Fifty percent of all renter households were also cost-burdened in 2022, a value up 3.2 percent from 2019 and 9 percent from 2001.

Researchers have found millennials are having a hard time paying for city housing markets. Dr. Riordan Frost, senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, joined CBS News to discuss why the generation is getting priced out.

According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015.

You’re considered to be “cost-burdened” if you pay more than 30 percent of your income in rent and utilities, and a new study from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that in 2022—the most recent year for which data is available—the cost-burdened constituted half of all renters nationwide. Half of all renters couldn’t afford what they paid in rent.

Half of American renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs — a key benchmark for affordability — with the financial strain rising the fastest for middle-class tenants. That’s according to a new report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which found that the number of such renters, considered to be “cost-burdened,” hit a record 22.4 million in 2022 — up 2 million from just three years before.

Unaffordability in America has soared to new heights, a report released on Thursday by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies shows. Nationwide, half of all renters now spend more than 30% of their paycheck on rent and utilities, the center found after analyzing 2022 census data.

A new Harvard report says 22.4 million households in the United States now spend more than 30 percent of their income in rent, with 12.1 million spending more than 50 percent.

A new Harvard University report finds that housing was unaffordable for a record half of renters in 2022. And a softening rental market might not help those who struggle most.

“A lot of that growth is coming from renters who are married, who have a college education and in some ways fit the profile of what would have been first-time home buyers,” says Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a rental-housing researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.