Nationwide rent burden and the rent crisis has hit an all-time high, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Learn how skyrocketing housing costs are fueling homelessness—and what you can do to protect yourself and your community before it’s too late.

“You have a full-time job. Where do you sleep?”

“I still sleep on the streets,” said Charlie, a homeless man engaged in an eye-opening interview with Invisible People.

“It doesn’t matter if you have two full-time jobs. It’s hard,” Charlie continued, acknowledging the need to pay for other things besides rent, such as food and transportation.

Charlie’s story is emblematic of a growing subgroup within the unsheltered community known as “working homeless” people. It is statistically proven that more than half of the homeless population is employed. Hence, screaming “Get a job!” from the window of your car when you see an unsheltered person at an intersection is not only cruel but also futile. The problem is not acquiring an occupation but rather the lack of housing affordability and the rent crisis.

Rent Crisis Has Adversely Impacted More Than 22.4 Million Households

Authors of a late January 2024 report claim that “climbing rents have propelled cost burdens to staggering new heights.” This is truly noteworthy, given that in 2022, the amount of US rent burden was already pretty staggering by most metrics, considering the number of cost-burdened renters included more than half of all American tenants.

It seemed then that the crisis couldn’t possibly get any worse. However, due to astronomical rent increases attributed to corporate greed and even AI-driven artificial inflation, things did get worse.

The report explains that the number of American tenants suffering from the burden of rent increased again, this time by 2 million more people over three years.

According to the Harvard researchers, some of the factors fueling the rent crisis include:

  • A 30% decrease in year-over-year affordable housing construction
  • An extended period of vastly increasing rental prices following the loss of pandemic-era aid and protections
  • A sharp uptick in rent burden among middle-income earners, described as households making between $30,000 and $74,999 annually (It’s important to note that this middle-income bracket saw the most significant increase in rent burden over the past three years when compared to low and high income earning households)

Read the full article about the U.S. rent crisis by Cynthia Griffith at Invisible People.