Apartment Renters "Burdened"

[dado potato]

Nearly half of American renters are "rent burdened", that is, they spend more than 30% of their income on rent.

11 million Americans spend more than 50% of their income on rent.


Eviction is nasty. Annually more children experience the loss of shelter due to eviction. It's not good for grown-ups to be evicted either.


The rental market is unique in every location. In the Northern Highlands of Wisconsin, $500-550/month is the going rate for 1 BR/1 bath apartment, with a coin operated laundry in a no-stairs building, and with off-street parking. I understand that the national average is about 3x that rent.

Some day I imagine I may be a renter … maybe in Wausau WI, maybe in Fort Collins CO, maybe in Ashland OR. I'd have to pay the landlord, wherever...

[razz]

People need a shelter, warmth and food. Those are basic necessities for living. It is truly sad when the cost of just one gobbles up the most of the revenue. This is a worldwide problem, I believe.

[Teacher Terry]

Small town Wisconsin is cheap but are there any jobs? Here we have homeless people with full time jobs. Also many places won’t let kids in a one bedroom apartment even if the parents sleep in the living room. Plus if you have opposite sex kids they say you need a 3 bedroom apartment. When I was a social worker in Wisconsin my clients ran into this problem.

[iris lilies]

Small town Wisconsin is cheap but are there any jobs? Here we have homeless people with full time jobs. Also many places won’t let kids in a one bedroom apartment even if the parents sleep in the living room. Plus if you have opposite sex kids they say you need a 3 bedroom apartment. When I was a social worker in Wisconsin my clients ran into this problem.

The solution there is to stay out of the clutches of CPS.

[Teacher Terry]

Sometimes they ended up there through no fault of their own and then because of losing some of their income by having the kids gone couldn’t rent a big enough place to get them back. My first case I naively thought good the kids will just go home now.

[Teacher Terry]

Aside from CPS a lot of apartment complexes have rules about bedrooms too. When we moved back to Wisconsin we were looking for a 2 bedroom apartment and had 2 boys. Some places said we had to rent a 3 bedroom which we could not afford. We did finally find a 2 bedroom that would rent to us.

[sweetana3]

That is a legal way to avoid too many residents. Keeps out big families and such. Note that I do not say it is moral or ethical or good. It is just a reality.

[dado potato]

I found an article that analyzed why a larger percentage of renters became burdened in the years from 1960 to 2014. In a nutshell increases in rent outstripped increases in incomes.

http://www.apartmentlist.com/rentono...wth-since-1960