Trends in Housing Affordability in the US, 1990-2010

Lack of decent, safe and reasonably-priced housing has significant negative impacts on the health, safety and welfare of families, individuals and children. These impacts affect labor productivity, healthcare costs, educational outcomes of K-12 children and result in overall lesser quality of life and life satisfaction.

This map, created by the Housing & Land Use Policy program at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center, provides an interactive format to explore changes in housing affordability in each county in the country between 1990 and 2010. In this map, the percentage of the population that is housing cost-burdened (i.e., spends over 30% of its income on housing costs) is used as the measure of housing affordability. The higher that percentage within a county, the lower the availability of reasonably-priced housing

The overall trend for the nation is as follows. In 1990, 38.6% of renter households, 19.4% of owner households and 27.3% of all households were housing cost-burdened. Over the next decade, these percentages changed marginally so that in 2000, 36.8% of renters, 21.8% of owners, and 27.7% of all households were cost-burdened. However, access to reasonably priced housing has dropped sharply since 2000. In 2010, an estimated 47.3% of renters, 30.4% of owners and 35.9% of all households were cost-burdened. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that in 2012, nearly 41 million households were cost-burdened, 9 million more than in 2002.