In 2020 thirty percent of households spent over thirty percent of their income on housing.

For the first time in a decade, housing cost burdens worsened significantly during the first year of the pandemic, according to an analysis of new data from the US Census Bureau and reported in The State of the Nation's Housing 2022. The share of all households who spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing increased to 30 percent in 2020, up 1.5 percentage point from the prior year—the first substantial uptick in cost burdens since 2010. The share of renters with cost burdens rose especially rapidly, climbing 2.6 percentage points to 46 percent. Meanwhile, cost burden rates for homeowners also rose 1.0 percentage point to 21 percent.  Rising cost burdens in 2020 reversed a nearly decade-long trend of gradually improving affordability. Indeed, the cost-burden rate peaked in 2010 in the aftermath of the housing crisis and Great Recession of the mid-2000s but has inched down every year since—excepting a slight uptick in 2018—declining 7.0 percentage points by 2019 when using the standard weights. But if estimates using the experimental weights accurately capture the changes in the first year of the pandemic, the jump in cost burdens in 2020 entirely reversed the 1.4 percentage point decline in 2019 and reversed one-fifth of the improvement in the cost-burden rate over the past decade. To put this in context, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, total cost burden shares rose just 1.8 percentage point in 2008–2010.  For renters, the 2.6 percentage point rise in cost burden shares in 2020 even more significantly cut into improving conditions before the pandemic. The 2020 increase wiped out more than half of the progress made in renter burdens over the prior eight years. Indeed, after peaking in 2011 at just under 51 percent, renter burdens declined 4.4 percentage points through 2019.

Source: The Harvard Joint Center For Housing Studies