Recently, a number that doesn’t seem particularly dramatic has been showing up in housing data. One thousand dollars. For many years, that amount roughly represented what a working family could afford to buy groceries and a two-bedroom home. It now operates more like a trapdoor. Less than two out of every hundred listings in Boston, Miami, and Washington, D.C., are below it. The apartments are reasonably priced. They’ve just disappeared.
The other half of the picture appears when you drive through Wichita in the spring. The kind of streets that never make magazine covers, with their modest brick ranch houses and half-mowed lawns. There are still about 54% of apartment listings that rent for less than a grand. McAllen trails closely behind, down near the Texas border. These establishments are survivors, not exactly deals. the final metro areas where the previous calculations are still valid. One quieter thing they have in common is that no one is fighting to live in them.
That particular detail is more important than it appears. A few years ago, a researcher by the name of Alan Mallach made an observation that continues to bother me. Teachers and nurses are outbid for homes in strong-market cities, which he described as a middle-class issue. Poor families crushed by rents that won’t go down even when the houses surrounding them are practically worthless are a harsher aspect of weaker cities. Because taxes, repairs, and a meager return don’t care what the market thinks, a landlord in Cleveland might own a $20,000 home and still charge $700 per month. $15,000 is more than half of what a single parent earns. There isn’t a version of that math where everything works out well.
Meanwhile, the suburbs are discreetly switching teams. Renters now outnumber owners in an increasing number of them; the white picket fence is still there, but it is leased rather than owned. This could be a transient pandemic hangover. It might also be the way things have changed. Rent has increased by almost 40% since 2019, and today’s tenants would have to save for more than ten years just to make a ten percent down payment.
As you watch this play out, you can’t help but notice how unimportant everything seems. No headline moment, no villain, no crash. Just a gradual tightening, year after year, city by city, until the reasonably priced map reduces to a few metro areas that the majority of Americans are unable to locate on a globe. Only a small percentage of eligible families are covered by the federal voucher system. Bipartisan legislation, building subsidies, and zoning disputes in town halls that no one attends are just a few of the policy proposals that keep coming in. It’s still unclear if any of it moves fast enough. Families vying for the final $900 apartments appear to already be aware of the solution.※
