Bidenomics Study: Low Income Families Spend Half Their Salary on Housing

About two-thirds of households at the bottom 20 percent of the income bracket pay over half their income in rent and utilities, a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies recently found.

The challenge for low income families to afford basic housing costs suggests President Joe Biden’s so-called “Bidenomics” of growing the economy from the “middle out and the bottom up” is not working.

• The federal government says shelter should consume 30 percent or less of household income, per the New York Times.
• Only about half of American renter households fall within the guidelines, per the Times.

Among working-class renters, the next bracket up from the bottom income bracket, the share with severe burdens nearly tripled in two decades to 17 percent, the study found.

Both low income and working-class renters are impacted with record high share of cost burdens, according to the study.

“Housing insecurity ripples through every domain of family life,” Johns Hopkins University sociologist Stefanie DeLuca told the Times. “It’s this constant mental and emotional tax.”

Saving for a house down payment to leave the rental market is not a viable option for many Americans. The average monthly mortgage payment soared to $3,322 under Biden, up from the average monthly mortgage payment of $1,787 under former President Donald Trump, an analysis from the Wall Street Journal recently found:

“Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans,” the Journal wrote, “even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago.”

“Many would-be buyers were already feeling stretched thin by home prices that shot quickly higher in the pandemic, but at least mortgage rates were low,” the report added. “Now that they are high, many people are just giving up.”

Follow Wendell Husebø on “X” @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.