Uh-oh, Severe Housing Burden

I’ve learned a new phrase, “severe housing burden,” an academic term for those who spend more than half their income on housing. Moderate housing burden is between 30% to 50% of income.  Spending 30% or less for housing is considered unburdened or reasonable.

Data from State of the Nation's Housing 2010

According the State of the Nation’s Housing 2010 report published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, 16% of all households spend more than half their income on housing. 16%! One in six households! And for those who rent it is one in four households. That’s an awful lot of people.  To be precise, this is  44.2 million Americans, 13.7 million of them children.

Three-quarters of these households are truly poor with incomes of less than $14,868 per year.  According to the study, households with children had less than $600 a month for all other expenses: food, medical, transportation, clothing, utilities, etc. The elderly and single-person households have less than $500. To have affordable housing, people in this income bracket would have to pay $372 or less for their housing.

Another 19.2 percent or 21,668 households are moderately burdened.  That makes a total of 35.6% that are struggling with the cost of housing. How many of these people struggling to make ends meet would improve their lives significantly if they chose to share their housing with others? Naturally, it’s not as easy as simply choosing to move in with another. It takes finding the right housemate to make it work.

Academics use the term “doubling up” to describe sharing housing. Along with the phrase comes a negative connotation. (And probably the image of someone sleeping on the couch.)  But in my research for my book, most of the home sharers I talked to had positive things to say about their experience.  It’s time for sharing housing to be a realistic solution, especially for those burdened with housing costs.