It’s become a familiar tune: For the fourth year in a row, a record-breaking number of renters can’t afford their housing costs.
According to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 22.7 million or 49% of renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, spending more than a third of their income on rent and utilities. More than a quarter of renters were severely cost-burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing costs.
In a decade that has seen seemingly ever-growing rents, those numbers are finally flattening and vacancy rates are going up thanks to new construction. But that hasn’t benefited many renters in need of affordable housing.
“It really comes down to the cruel math of housing is expensive to produce,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Particularly what we’ve seen over the last five years, it’s gotten more expensive not just to build housing, but to operate housing.”
In one example, the cost of materials for residential construction rose 42% from 2020 to 2025, according to the center’s report.
This environment has put pressure on local and state governments to usher in the development of affordable housing, and one method has been building incentives. Last year, the city and county of Denver, Colorado and the Denver Housing Authority launched a pilot program that gave five multifamily developments a tax exemption in exchange for providing deed-restricted, middle-income affordable housing.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said the program led to about 1,200 affordable units.
“We’ll continue doing that this year, and we believe we can add 1,000 to 1,500 units every year with that strategy, as well as a set of other strategies we’re using to bring on more housing,” he said.
Meanwhile, La Shelle Dozier, CEO of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, said housing authorities are using different types of funding and public-private partnerships to cope with decades of disinvestment.
“Sometimes people will say, ‘My gosh, look at public housing,’” she said. “Well, it’s really because we haven’t had the resources that we need to maintain and keep public housing, but that’s really critical because we cannot lose any of the affordable housing that we have. What housing authorities have had to do is to really transform from just managing public housing to becoming housing developers, so they have entered that field to create additional units and to improve the units that they have.”
Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting on Bluesky or by joining our newsletter.
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