Is America’s Housing Affordability Problem a Housing Problem?

Abstract

We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure share cutoffs and the distribution of rents. We find that housing affordability is largely a problem for single-parent families and, to a lesser extent, single-person households. Several of the least affordable cities by our metrics are not glamour cities in the US Northeast, California, or South Florida but rather cities with both low incomes and low rents. Finally, we show how overcrowding in many high-cost cities leads to an understatement of the extent of affordability problems if affordability is measured using the actual share of income paid toward rent.