The cost of renting a home in the United States is surging and young workers have felt the sharpest pain, many of them taking on additional jobs or roommates to afford housing costs.
Household rents in 2021 jumped 10% from pre-pandemic levels, according to Census Bureau estimates released last week. The figures came as rising healthcare and rental costs pushed US consumer prices up unexpectedly last month.
The data from the bureau's annual American Community Survey put median US rent at $1,037 in 2021, up from $941 in 2019. Year-over-year increases in the median household rent over the past decade were typically 2% or 3% one exception was the 5% rise from 2018 to 2019.
Among those affected most are recent college graduates and other new entrants to the workforce, who have little in savings and cannot afford to buy a house.
Take Maeve Kozlark, a New York University doctoral student. The 23-year-old spent a year in an apartment in New York City's Queens borough with a door that wouldn't lock. Her landlord's refusal to fix the latch prompted her to make a TikTok video about it.
A year and 230,000 views later, the lock was still broken when her landlord announced a $1,000 hike on top of her existing rent of $2,500, Kozlark said. She left the apartment in June.
“So began our crazy search to find something that was affordable and not a shoebox, which is pretty impossible,” said Kozlark, who considers herself lucky to have found a new place to rent for $3,300 in Queens.
Similar accounts of abrupt price hikes and rental struggles abound across the country. In Austin, Texas, 22-year-old Skyler Lee signed a one-year lease for a two-bedroom apartment for which she and her boyfriend together pay $1950 a month in rent.
Within a month of moving in, comparable apartments in the building were being rented out at $2,400 per month – the price Lee expects to pay to renew her lease next year.
In Chicago, 23-year-old Kelvin Angelo Cupay decided to forego renting altogether and move in with family in Chicago because he expects to have to fork out close to $1000 in monthly rent, which he cannot afford while searching for a job.
On the West Coast, Celine Pun, 21, initially added a housemate to her Santa Barbara apartment to make costs affordable. But she ended up moving out when the $600 in monthly rent for her share of the three-bedroom apartment rose by $50 and some of her five housemates left.
“It was a very frustrating process,” Pun said.
mOAR
Meh, when you quiet quit, you quietly cannot afford anything.
Household rents in 2021 jumped 10% from pre-pandemic levels, according to Census Bureau estimates released last week. The figures came as rising healthcare and rental costs pushed US consumer prices up unexpectedly last month.
The data from the bureau's annual American Community Survey put median US rent at $1,037 in 2021, up from $941 in 2019. Year-over-year increases in the median household rent over the past decade were typically 2% or 3% one exception was the 5% rise from 2018 to 2019.
Among those affected most are recent college graduates and other new entrants to the workforce, who have little in savings and cannot afford to buy a house.
Take Maeve Kozlark, a New York University doctoral student. The 23-year-old spent a year in an apartment in New York City's Queens borough with a door that wouldn't lock. Her landlord's refusal to fix the latch prompted her to make a TikTok video about it.
A year and 230,000 views later, the lock was still broken when her landlord announced a $1,000 hike on top of her existing rent of $2,500, Kozlark said. She left the apartment in June.
“So began our crazy search to find something that was affordable and not a shoebox, which is pretty impossible,” said Kozlark, who considers herself lucky to have found a new place to rent for $3,300 in Queens.
Similar accounts of abrupt price hikes and rental struggles abound across the country. In Austin, Texas, 22-year-old Skyler Lee signed a one-year lease for a two-bedroom apartment for which she and her boyfriend together pay $1950 a month in rent.
Within a month of moving in, comparable apartments in the building were being rented out at $2,400 per month – the price Lee expects to pay to renew her lease next year.
In Chicago, 23-year-old Kelvin Angelo Cupay decided to forego renting altogether and move in with family in Chicago because he expects to have to fork out close to $1000 in monthly rent, which he cannot afford while searching for a job.
On the West Coast, Celine Pun, 21, initially added a housemate to her Santa Barbara apartment to make costs affordable. But she ended up moving out when the $600 in monthly rent for her share of the three-bedroom apartment rose by $50 and some of her five housemates left.
“It was a very frustrating process,” Pun said.
mOAR
Meh, when you quiet quit, you quietly cannot afford anything.
