Cities May Be Facing a New Housing Crisis

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As rents and demand for renting increase, millions of Americans are being evicted -- sometimes with only a few days' notice.

During the housing crisis and Great Recession a decade ago, millions of Americans were evicted from their homes for being unable to pay their mortgages. Now, many housing experts say America is on the verge of a new eviction crisis, and this time, it's affecting renters.

“We have had basically a lot of demand for rental, and tight credit markets have pushed up that demand by people who would normally own homes,” says Dan Immergluck, an urban studies professor at Georgia State University.

The 2008 fiscal collapse reshaped the housing market, prompting greater scrutiny of banks' lending practices and keeping more people from purchasing a home. That's placed more pressure on renters, especially low-income renters, according to the 2017 State of the Nation’s Housing report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Apartment List, an online rental property search firm that also collects data on the rental market, recently published a report detailing what many housing experts say are troubling warning signs in the rental sector.

According to the report, nearly one in five renters were unable to pay the full amount of their rent for at least one month of a three-month period in 2017. Some 3.7 million Americans experienced an eviction at some point in 2017, and most of those renters earned less than $30,000 per year. (The number of evictions includes formal, court-ordered instances as well as "soft evictions," in which tenants leave under the threat of a formal eviction but before the actual notice had been given.)

The phenomenon isn't just hitting hot markets like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. It's a problem in many cities across the country, even those that haven't been impacted by gentrification.

Cities with a short supply of affordable housing and large populations of poor and low-income residents topped the Apartment List eviction rankings. The top three cities in the study were Memphis, Phoenix and Atlanta, where the rate of residents who had been evicted ranged from 5.7 percent to 6.1 percent. All three cities have poverty rates above 20 percent. In Memphis, one in four residents lives at or below the federal poverty line.


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