Renters and politics

The New Republic - Almost all candidates and elected officials around the country have been homeowners, at least until recently. A 2022 study from Boston University and the University of Georgia found that 93 percent of officeholders at federal, state, and local levels (in 190 of the country’s largest cities) were homeowners, many of them in single-family homes worth more than the median home value in their zip codes. Only 2 percent to 7 percent of officeholders at various levels were renters, while almost half of the people in the cities surveyed were renters.

That underrepresentation shapes policy at all levels, and influences the ways that politicians speak about housing—like focusing on homebuying and mortgages. Less attention has been given to the full-blown crisis facing renters. A new report out Thursday from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. Almost half of all renters were burdened by high costs in 2024, meaning they spent more than a third of their incomes on rent, a sign of financial distress. Just over a quarter are severely cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than half their incomes on rent. And that’s nationwide. The percentage of renters who are cost-burdened has risen in 44 states in the past five years. What’s more surprising is that over the past few years, the number of rent-stressed households in middle- and even high-middle incomes has grown too. While the lowest-income households are the most burdened, 49 percent of renters making between $45,000 to $74,999 are also burdened, a share that has increased almost 10 points since the pandemic.

These shifts may have helped to propel candidates last year who promised to address renters’ issues. The most high-profile among them were Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, both renters, who became mayors of their respective cities by defeating establishment Democrats who were homeowners. “More and more people are rent-burdened, and in terms of [that burden] climbing the income scale, I think it just speaks to how unaffordable a lot of places are becoming,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, the lead author of the Harvard report.