More Americans Struggling to Pay the Rent
As the portion of Americans renting rather than owning their homes has grown in recent years, so has the number of Americans for whom the monthly rent check has become a burden.
In 2013, almost half of all renters were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, with more than a quarter paying half their income to their landlord, according the "State of the Nation’s Housing 2015" report issued today by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Rising rents aren’t just impacting low-income consumers. One in five renters earning $45,000-$75,000 is paying at least a third of their income in rent.
Related: There’s Only One Way Rents Will Go: Sky High
The increase in rental rates represents a byproduct of the falling home ownership rate, which dropped to 63.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, the lowest level since 1989. The rate has fallen for the past eight years and appears poised to continue its decline.
That puts the 2010s on pace to be the strongest decade for rental growth in history, and the national vacancy rate fell to just 7.6 percent, its lowest level in 20 years, according to the Harvard report. The trend reflects increased demand from millennials, as well as a growing preference for renting in households aged 45-64 and higher-income households.
Rents rose 3.2 percent last year, twice the rate of overall inflation, spurring builders to begin construction on more multi-family units than in any years since 1989. “And if job growth continues to pick up, we could see even more demand, as young adults move out of their parents’ homes and into their own apartments,” Joint Center senior research associate Daniel McCue said in a statement.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
