Rents are soaring in many U.S. cities as the economy rebounds, squeezing the budgets of tenants who also face increased risk of eviction after courts overturned a pandemic-era ban.
There’s no single indicator that captures a complex national picture, as Covid-19 drove major shifts in where people live and work. Still, data point to tight markets in much of the country.
The median monthly charge on a vacant rental jumped by $185 in March from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A national index compiled by Apartmentlist.com shows that rents rose 1.9% in April alone, the most in data going back to 2017.
The rising costs will pile pressure on poorer families who are more likely to rent -– and less likely to be earning money right now, in a recovery that’s seen better-paid jobs bounce back faster. For low-income Americans, shelter accounts for 40% of spending.
Adding another risk, a federal judge in Washington ruled on Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exceeded its authority by ordering a nationwide moratorium on tenant evictions last year.
Read More: Judges Strikes Down CDC’s National Moratorium on Evictions
The ban, due to last through June, had loopholes that allowed some evictions to proceed -– but it still offered protection for those who’d lost their jobs. About 24% of renters, roughly 8 million people, missed at least one housing payment since March 2020 according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Rapid Rebound
The early months of the pandemic saw a headline-grabbing decline in prices for some expensive urban markets, like Manhattan and San Francisco. Higher-income workers were able to move out of city-center apartments to work remotely from somewhere else.
One result was a lot of unoccupied high-end properties in such places. That may have exaggerated the jump in median costs for vacant rentals as measured by the Census Bureau, creating what’s called a “compositional effect” that skews the data, according to Chris Salvati, a housing economist at Apartmentlist.com.
