Welcome to the new norm.
Think Progress-
Paying more than 30 percent of your income on rent is what experts call unaffordable. Yet the number of people who fall into that group has reached record numbers, according to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
The share of renters who pay more than 30 percent of what they make on housing, or what the study labels “cost-burdened,” rose 12 percentage points last decade, reaching 50 percent in 2010. That includes 27 percent who face a “severe burden,” or in other words, pay more than half of their income on rent, a figure that rose 8 percentage points. Initial estimates show that there were a record 21.1 million renters who were cost-burdened in 2012.