High rents increasingly becoming a driver of financial fragility for low-income older households

Eva Conway, Barbara Schuster, Siavash Radpour and Teresa Ghilarducci
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Teresa Ghilarducci: Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org

No 2023-02, SCEPA policy note series. from Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School

Abstract: Outside of Social Security, housing equity is the primary mechanism for accumulating wealth in the United States, and indeed, 73 percent of households over 65 own their home.1 It may therefore come as a surprise that more than a quarter of households with a member between the ages of 55 and 64 in the bottom half of the income distribution face housing-related financial fragility. Middle- and high-income households are not exempt from the risk of financial fragility due to housing costs and debt, though many of these households own their own homes. Among these groups, 10.3 and 6.4 percent, respectively, face high housing costs and debt burdens (see Figure 1). What’s more, the share of older low-income households facing housing-related financial fragility has increased steadily; between 2013 and 2020, the share of low-income older households who had to pay rent exceeding 30 percent of their income increased from 18.2 percent to 23.7 percent (See Figure A1 in the Appendix for details).

Keywords: Financial fragility; low-income; Workers; Jobs; Renting; Risk; Older workers; debt; retirement; retirement savings; emergency savings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 E24 I14 J32 J38 J62 J83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-ure
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