This is part of the series on the insecurities produced by American capitalism for most Americans

Housing Insecurity

Housing is a basic human necessity. Questions of availability, stability, and affordability plague large portions of the US population.

Renters

Affordable rent is generally defined as less than 30% of a family’s gross income. In 2020, 45% of US renters spent more than 30% of their income on rent. An astonishing 23% spent more than 50%.¹ Note that this does not take into account the additional burdens of location. Is housing available close to work and school sites? As Figure 3: The Number of Cost Burdened Renters Hit an All-Time High below demonstrates. The number of renters paying more than 30% of their income in rent neared 50% in 2022. Those paying more than 50% of income for rent is 22%. That is some 12 million renter families.

Meanwhile, the stock of low-rent units is falling.²

Evictions are an ongoing feature of housing precarity. From UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project report 7.13.2021:

• “41% of all households in our 53 metro study area (26.9 million) live in neighborhoods where there is a high level of vulnerability to evictionor displacement
• 52% of all renters live in neighborhoods with a high riskof displacement or eviction.
• 73% of Black-headed and 63% of Latinx-headed renter households live in neighborhoods with a high riskof displacement or eviction.
• 74% of Black renters live in neighborhoods with a high riskof eviction.”³

Homelessness

Then there is the fact of homelessness:

Record-High Homeless Counts. A record-high 653,104 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2023. This is more than a 12.1 percent increase over the previous year.

More People Than Ever Are Experiencing Homelessness for the First Time. From 2019-2023, the number of people who entered emergency shelter for the first time increased more than 23 percent.¹

Record High Numbers of People Living Unsheltered, Especially Among Individuals. In 2023, a record high 256,610 people, or 39.3 percent of all people experiencing homelessness, were unsheltered. More than 50 percent of individuals experiencing homelessness were unsheltered.⁴

Homeownership

Homeownership is a much-vaunted part of the American dream. In post-WWII America, the middle class was buoyed by government programs (Federal Housing Agency, GI Bill….) and the booming economy. With millions of newly built single-family homes, suburban America drove home ownership from 44% in 1940 to 63% in 1970.⁵ Before WWII, fewer than 13% of the US population lived in suburbs. By 2010, more than half of the population lived there. The typical 1950s suburban development house had 983 sq. ft with two bedrooms, 1 ½ baths, a living room, and modern kitchen appliances. These were the “starter homes”. In metro NYC in the early 1950s, buying a home in Levittown on Long Island became cheaper than renting an apartment in the city.

Over the period from 1970 to 2000, the average home cost three times the annual family income. Today, it is more than seven times the annual family income.⁶ It is no surprise then that young people in their late 20s and early 30s are not buying homes at the rate their parent’s generation did. They are renters in perpetuity.

We discussed earlier how financialization has affected many aspects of life. Housing is one of those. You might think of your home as a place to raise your children and socialize with family and friends, a place that fosters your health and well-being. Since the 1980s, housing has become a financial asset. It has become another commodity to be exploited for financial gains. Under the neoliberal regime, government has essentially ceased to provide new housing, directly and indirectly, for the poor, working class, and middle classes. Big businesses, particularly private equity, have bought vast swaths of housing and turned it into an engine to extract money from housing dwellers.

1. “How Much of Their Incomes American Renters Spent on Housing Costs in 2020.” Pew Research Center (blog). Accessed August 8, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/23/key-facts-about-housing-affordability-in-the-u-s/ft_22-03-23_housingaffordability_3a/.
2. Graphs Figure 3 and Figure 13 are from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/americas-rental-housing-2024
3. https://www.urbandisplacement.org/maps/housing-precarity-risk-model/ accessed 2.21.2022
4. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/
5. US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership,” Census.gov, accessed September 30, 2022, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-owner.html.
6. Silvan Frank, “Home Price to Income Ratio (US & UK) – 75 Year Chart | Longtermtrends,” accessed August 8, 2023, https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/.