Are Philadelphia Renters Cost-Burdened?

There are more renters in America right now than there have been at any point since the 1960s. Home ownership is at a half-century low, and renting has spiked. This has been the trend since the housing crash of the late 2000s. A discouraging trend that’s gone alongside the rise in renting? Renters paying too much for their housing. It’s a commonly-held rule that you shouldn’t pay more than 30 percent of your monthly income on your rent or mortgage. According to researchers at Apartment List, over half of America’s 43 million rental households are paying more than 30 percent of their incomes on their housing. In Philadelphia, that percentage is even higher.

This map shows where Americans are most burdened by rental costs.

The City of Brotherly Love is a great place to live, but rents are high here (as is the case in many big cities across the United States). And rental prices are only rising, while the average household income is not. In Philadelphia, 57.5 percent of renters are considered “cost-burdened,” or paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent. Rental Jungle says that the average rental in Philadelphia runs about $1,361 per month.

The number of renters in Philadelphia started to climb in 2007 and peaked in 2010 – a symptom of the Great Recession and housing crash. However, numbers have fallen only modestly since then. This is a trend keeping with just about every big city on Apartment List’s survey. Home ownership is at the lowest in America that it has been since 1967. Meanwhile, the number of renters in the United States only continues to grow.