You Should Be Worried About Housing Affordability

Stuart Gabriel is the Arden Realty Chair, Professor of Finance and Director at the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate.ab

The housing affordability crisis may been one of the most pressing issues that we face. The issue is so pressing, in fact, that UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate has launched the UCLA Affordable Housing Policy Briefs, a new series of research reports that focus on affordability issues. The first in the series is titled Why Affordability Matters, authored by Stuart A. Gabriel and Gary Dean Painter, and explores the increase in rent-burdened households nationwide. “Rent-burdened” is defined as households that contribute more than 30% of their income to rent, and as of 2015, more than half of the households in the US were considered rent-burdened. Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Miami, consecutively, are the most rent-burdened households in the country, and when the research isolates for low-income households with less than $15,000 in annual income, the numbers are even more staggering. The chart below shows the share of renters with cost burdens by city. We sat down with Gabriel, , Arden Realty Chair, professor of finance and director at Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA, to talk about the affordability crisis and why the number of rent-burden households is increasing.

GlobeSt.com: First, tell me about the impetus to launch a series of study focusing on the affordability crisis.