It’s winter for the American renter. A patchwork of tenant protections and government payments connected to the pandemic have disappeared, leaving renters exposed to some of the largest year-to-year rent hikes the country has ever seen.

Zillow clocked America’s annual rent increase at 15.7 percent at the end of 2021. Apartment List says it was 17.8 percent. CoreLogic, which measures rents in single-family homes and smaller buildings, recorded the fastest year-over-year rent hike since it started counting in 2005. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports the vacancy rate has reached a 40-year low. Some share of that reflects a rebound from 2020’s steep declines—but most does not. All measurements agree: The fastest increases have been in cities like Miami, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, where rents did not collapse in 2020 and now have risen between 20 and 35 percent. The fear is that these sudden hikes will force millions of families to search for new homes, after the pandemic saw evictions dry up and renter mobility fall to a record low.

To continue reading the rest of the article, please click on the source link below:

https://slate.com/business/2022/02/new-york-good-cause-eviction-new-jersey-housing.html