The Antiplanner’s recent coverage of housing affordability has focused on single-family homes. But a recent article by Andrew Jakabovics points out that rents are also rising, both in dollars and in the percent of people’s incomes that it consumes. “About half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, Jakabovics says. Since 2000, the share of renters spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent has grown by more than 40 percent.
Unfortunately, Jacabovics never discusses the real cause of this problem or the great geographic disparities in rents. A close look at the data (American Community Survey table B25071) reveals that renters are hardest hit in Florida, Hawai’i, California, and Oregon, all states with strong growth-management laws. (Florida weakened its law in 2011, but few if any regions have weakened their growth-management plans since then.) Meanwhile, rental housing is still very affordable in states such as Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
Hawai’i and California aren’t surprising, but it is a bit surprising to see Oregon near the top of the list. Oregon’s “smart-growth” policies were supposed to avoid this problem by building a lot of multifamily housing in place of the single-family housing that has been made unaffordable by the urban-growth boundaries around every city in the state. But this clearly hasn’t worked.
