Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability

Bryan P. Grady

Housing Policy Debate, 2019, vol. 29, issue 6, 977-989

Abstract: In the United States, housing is most commonly considered unaffordable when a household spends more than 30% of income on housing and utilities. Although easy to calculate, it fails to account for how other categories of essential expenses affect income available to spend on housing. This article compares the ratio-based approach with shelter poverty, a measure that accounts for these elements, evaluating differences in results between the two methods among renters in Ohio. Shelter poverty identifies a higher rate of households in economic distress due to housing market conditions. Further, the average “affordability gap” is four times higher using the shelter poverty than with the 30% threshold. Relative to shelter poverty, the ratio method underestimates the unaffordability of rental housing in economically distressed areas, as measured by median household income, and modestly overestimates it in high-income areas.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10511482.2019.1639065 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:houspd:v:29:y:2019:i:6:p:977-989

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RHPD20

DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2019.1639065

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Policy Debate is currently edited by Tom Sanchez, Susanne Viscarra and Derek Hyra

More articles in Housing Policy Debate from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().