HUD and Census Bureau Release New American Housing Survey

The median renter now pays nearly the same as the median owner in total housing costs.

Every two years, HUD and the Census Bureau produce the American Housing Survey (AHS), the most comprehensive analysis of the nation's housing inventory. The AHS is the largest regular national housing sample survey in the U.S. and tracks housing units over time.

The data provides insights on how homes age and how the occupants of homes change. The recently released 2021 AHS provides insights on how Americans’ relationship with their homes changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 when compared to the data from before the pandemic.

The AHS covers the composition and quality of the nation's housing stock; rents, mortgages, and other housing costs; and neighborhood conditions. The AHS is used by the public, policymakers, and professionals in many fields for research, planning, and decision making, as well as to understand the current state of our nation’s housing markets and how they’ve changed over time.

Since the 2019 AHS was conducted, homeowners saw sharp increases in home values and were able to borrow at low interest rates. Renters, in contrast, experienced significant cost increases, such that the median renter now pays nearly the same as the median owner in total housing costs. However, owners have many more square feet per person, 800 square feet compared to 500 for renters. And homeowners were also able to move to a better home on average when they moved, while renters were just as likely to move to a better home as a worse home. Lower income households that moved had lower rates of moving to higher quality neighborhoods and housing units. Other highlights from the survey include:

• Inability to pay rent payments is similar in 2021 to pre-pandemic. The data show that in 2021 relative to 2017, renter inability to pay the rent was similar in the two years, about 7 percent, likely due to the CARES Act and other interventions, including federal unemployment insurance benefits and foreclosure and eviction moratoriums;
• In 2021, roughly 800,000 renters reported being threatened with an eviction. Of those, about 21 percent received a court-ordered eviction notice. In 2021, the percentage of owners who missed or made late payments on their mortgage was less in 2021 than in 2017 (2.5 percent in 2021 compared to 4 percent in 2017);
• The internet continues to increase as the primary way people are finding rental units. Between 2019 and 2021, 21 million households moved into rental units and 14 million households moved into owned units. The internet was more widely used to find a unit to rent (43%) in 2021 than in 2019 (37%). Many renters (45%) searched in only a single neighborhood; and
• Among households that moved, most did not move to a better neighborhood; quality of homes was better for owners who moved but mixed for renters.