How Unaffordable Is Housing Today?

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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.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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