How Unaffordable Is Housing Today?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In an op-ed over at BuzzFeed, the national director of the Opportunity Starts at Home campaign says that most people think housing affordability is a big problem:

Those people aren’t imagining things: The affordability crisis has indeed reached historic heights, and the data is shocking. Since 1960, renters’ incomes have increased by only 5% while rents have risen 61%.

I agree that housing affordability is a problem, but renters’ incomes have surely gone up more than 5 percent since 1960. What’s going on here? Apparently this figure comes from the annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard:

The report doesn’t say where this income data comes from, but it sure doesn’t seem likely. Here are the incomes of the poorest to the richest families since 1960:

These are the raw figures from the Census Bureau. If I use a different inflation measure, incomes have gone up even more. If I break out income by age or education or race, nothing much changes. For every demographic group you can think of, earnings since 1960 have gone up at least 50 percent, and usually much more.

Given all this, what are the odds that renters’ incomes have increased by only 5 percent? Pretty slim, I’d say. In fact, if the JCHS data on rent is accurate, it looks as though incomes have most likely gone up more than rents. Where did this stuff come from?

POSTSCRIPT: The odd thing about this is why the series starts with 1960 in the first place. That’s a long time ago and it includes the booming economy (and incomes) of the 60s. If you start, instead, at 1975, rents have definitely gone up more than incomes at the low end. It’s not 60 percent vs. 5 percent, but it might easily be 50 percent vs. 20 percent.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate