The Housing Crisis Is Coming for the Middle Class

Curbed reports that new research shows the lack of affordable housing is slowly trickling up to affect the middle class.

A new paper by Jenny Schuetz, a housing policy fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, found that some of the severe affordability issues impacting low-income Americans have crept into the lower-middle class and, without action, will get worse. In “Cost, crowding, or commuting? Housing stress on the middle class,” Schuetz looked at census data to find the impact of a decade when housing costs rose faster than average incomes.

If you break down the nation into five income groups, the crises faced by the fifth group—or the lowest-income—are increasingly being seen within the fourth group, the lower-middle class. The fifth of the country with the lowest income spends 60 percent of their money on housing, while the next-lowest fifth spends 40 percent, both significantly higher than the 30 percent recommended by economists.

“The issues facing low-income Americans are now showing up in lower-middle-income Americans, and I think that’s something we should worry about,” says Schuetz. “It’s a national pattern. That group is spending more money on rent everywhere, in Cleveland and not just in California.”

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