Since 2001, rents in the United States have increased at 3 percent per year, on average, after adjusting for inflation, while incomes have declined an average of 0.1 percent annually over the same period, according to Pew Research Group. While home prices fell for four years following the global financial crisis, rents continued to charge upward. While the share of homeowners who are cost burdened — defined as households that spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing — fell to 22.5 percent in 2017, its lowest mark of the century, the share of cost-burdened renters stayed at 47.4 percent, only 3.4 percentage points improved from the 2011 peak, according to The State of the Nation’s Housing 2019, published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
Since the global financial crisis, however, much of the discussion around housing has focused on the homeownership rate’s precipitous fall from its 2004 peak, at more than 69 percent,
