Raw Data: Inflation of Rental Housing

Here’s some more raw data about the housing market. This chart shows how much rent has increased compared to the overall inflation rate since 1960:

Over this period, rent has increased less than overall inflation. However, around 2000 rent inflation started to catch up. So let’s zoom in:

Since 2000, the rent index has increased 73 percent compared to only 46 percent for overall inflation. So rent has increased about 20 percent in real terms.

But it’s worth showing this as a percentage of income too. As I’ve been browsing around the internet I’ve seen a surprising number of completely screwed up charts about this. There are charts that compare real income to nominal rent. There are charts that compare real rent to real income but use the wrong numbers for income. There are charts that compare rent to some kind of mythical “renter income.” All of them should set off alarm bells instantly since they inevitably show that rent has increased by some phenomenally high number that no one should believe. So here is median rent compared to median income:

And here’s what we get if we zoom in on the past 20 years:

But what about young people, you ask? Or the poor? Here’s the same chart using median income for 25-34 year-olds and median income for the lowest income quintile:

As with everyone else, incomes of the young and poor fell during the Great Recession and then rebounded. They didn’t rebound as much as for older and richer workers, but even so, their income has increased at almost exactly the same rate as rent. The young and the poor, if they rent equivalent housing, are paying only about 1 percent more than they did in 2000.

Once again: this is national data. It tells us nothing about either rent or income in specific big cities. On a national basis, however, it suggests that for the median renter, rent has either been flat or has fallen as a percentage of income over the past 20 years, and over the past 60 years it’s fallen considerably.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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