12 tips to amp your housing coverage
Like the Bob Dylan song says, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The perfect storm that is the U.S. housing market is battering Americans from coast to coast.
The rent is too damn high. Or if you like the technical term, a record 50% of renters are cost-burdened, with half of them spending over 50% of their income on rent and utilities.
Buying a home is an impossible dream for millions. With prices rising faster than incomes, it takes five times the median household income to meet the price of the typical home. For decades, a threefold gap was considered manageable.
A record number of people are homeless; over 770,000, a third more than five years ago.
The latest State of the Nation’s Housing from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies documents all of this. The results are not news so much as an affirmation of a stubborn epic fail. No wonder that nearly half of Americans say the cost of housing is a major source of stress in their lives.
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