Economy
The Neighborhoods Where Housing Costs Devour Budgets
A significant chunk of Americans spend more than half their incomes on rent or home mortgage payments. Here’s the data on the severely housing-burdened.
Paying rent or a mortgage is never easy. But in thousands of neighborhoods across the country, it’s a burden of epidemic proportions.
More than 10 percent of U.S. households spend at least half their total income on housing costs—far more than the one-third that financial experts advise as a maximum limit. These severely housing-burdened households can be rich or poor, but around half of them are located in neighborhoods where at least one neighbor in three is facing a similar housing burden, according to a CityLab analysis of U.S. Census data obtained from the National Historical Geographic Information System.