ABSTRACT
The long-standing struggle among low- and moderate-income households to secure affordable housing in this country has in this decade expanded to historically unprecedented levels. Nearly seven million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure during the housing mortgage crisis and Great Recession that followed (CoreLogic 2015). Depressed wages and constrained credit placed the dream of homeownership further out of reach and triggered a ten-year decline in homeownership rates, from 69 percent in 2004 to 63 percent in 2015 (U.S. Census Bureau 2016). As a result of these economic shocks combined with demographic trends, growth in renter households nationally is averaging 1,000,000 per year since 2010, compared with less than 400,000 per year during the 2000s. (JCHS 2015). The current surge in demand for rental housing is fueled in large part by demographic groups and income brackets that in the past were more likely to be homeowners: middle income, non-Hispanic White, middle-age and retiree households. They have put a squeeze on affordable housing for the rapidly rising population of traditional renters: low-income, minority and young, newly-forming households.
