Cost-Burdened Renters Down Slightly

A new study from Apartment List assesses the share of cost-burdened renters in the U.S., and finds that roughly 25 percent of renting Denverites are spending more than half of their income on housing.

Renters spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing are considered cost-burdened. Apartment List used Census Bureau data to determine cost burdens at the metro level, and in metro Denver, 23.8 percent of renting households were deemed "severely burdened" in 2017, and 27 percent renters were considered "burdened." The Denver Post reports that in Colorado's second-largest metro, Colorado Springs, 24.9 percent of renter households were severely burdened and 24.7 percent were burdened. 

As much attention as that gets, a larger share of households in Grand Junction and Pueblo carried that heavy a burden, despite much lower average rents in those cities. “There are all of these rural parts of the country where housing costs are low, but there isn’t any economic opportunity,” said Chris Salviati, a housing economist with Apartment List in San Francisco.

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