Skyrocketing rents across the United States are far outpacing income growth, making housing for working- and lower-middle-class Americans even more unaffordable, an economic report published by Moody’s Analytics details.
The report shows that while U.S. rents since 1999 have jumped almost 135 percent, incomes have only climbed about 77 percent.
“Last year, the share of American household income needed to rent an average-priced apartment crossed the rent-burdening 30 percent threshold for the first time in Moody’s nearly 25 years of tracking the U.S. average rent-to-income ratio,” the report states:
Rising mortgage rates caused many households to be priced out from buying a home, and kept would-be buyers in their apartments. Rental demand surged as a result and drove rates sky high. [Emphasis added]
In 1999, New York was the only U.S. metro area where rent consumed more than 30 percent of a household’s monthly income. A median-income household renting there would have spent nearly 54 percent of their income for an average-priced apartment. [Emphasis added]
By the end of 2022, seven metros had rent burdens greater than 30 percent — six are located on the East Coast. [Emphasis added]
As the report details, “increased demand has put pressure on rental rates and made it harder for renters to find affordable housing.”
A portion of that increased demand is driven by the nation’s decades-long mass immigration policy which admits more than a million legal immigrants annually plus a million foreign visa workers — in addition to hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens who are added to the United States population every year — all of whom need places to live.
As Breitbart News reported, the U.S. population hit 333.3 million residents in 2022. More than 80 percent of that population growth is due to legal immigration, which was raised to sky-high levels in the early 1990s by then-President George H.W. Bush and has not been reduced since.
Since 1999, nearly 16 million immigrants have been added to the U.S. population.
“Letting in too many people drives up housing costs for normal Americans,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) wrote in a Twitter post. “Stop Biden’s border crisis, and stop his war on home affordability.”
Letting in too many people drives up housing costs for normal Americans. Stop Biden’s border crisis, and stop his war on home affordability. pic.twitter.com/eY740eqjUh
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) May 22, 2023
Even advocates for mass immigration have admitted that the policy increases rents and home prices for mainly working- and lower-middle-class Americans.
Last week, New York Magazine wrote that mass immigration is “bad for housing prices,” joining other establishment media outlets — including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal — which have made such an admission.
Likewise, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy group explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades helped raise housing prices by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers, but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
