WASHINGTON — More people than ever are renting instead of buying homes, but being a renter isn’t getting any easier.
For many households, the monthly rent check is so big that it eats up the majority of their paycheck — and the burden is growing. Some 20.7 million rental households — or about half of all renters — spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2013, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. About 11 million of those households spent more than half of their paycheck on rent and utilities, up 37 percent from 2003,. (Financial advisers typically recommend that people spend less than a third of their pay on housing costs.)
Renters in cities that people expect to be expensive, such as New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., aren’t the only ones struggling to pay the bills. “The rental housing crisis is everywhere,” says Angela Boyd, vice president of advocacy at Enterprise Community Partners, an organization that advocates for affordable housing.
Take Miami, where close to 36 percent of renters spent more than half of their pay on rent and utilities in 2013, the highest of the 100 metro areas studied in the report. Someone earning the median household income of $32,000 and paying the median monthly rent bill of $1,100 would spend 39 percent of their pay on housing.
