Housing Project

Housing Costs in the United States

The aim of this project is to investigate and visualize how housing costs have changed over time in the US. Rising costs of homes, rental units, and the percent of income spent on housing have been a topic of great debate recently. The aim of this project is to use data to come to conclusions about the true changes in the cost of housing in national and metro areas. The source of data for the project is the American Community Surey, which is a yearly sample of Americans that aims to understand the contemporary state of consumers. This is highly relevant to undergraduate students, who will soon graduate and will enter the formal rental and housing market.

To begin this investigation, we explore national trends over the last twenty years at a national level. This is the first section, which walks through state level trends from 2003 to 2023. There is then a brief analysis of the West, which has seen high housing costs relative to other regions. To understand how costs might differ amongs racial and income groups, a disaggregated exploration follows.

The final section focuses on New York City, one of the main destinations for graduating University of Virginia students. This localized exploration yields more nuanced and specific results significant to students entering the market.

I. National Housing

National Rent Burden Dashboard

This interactive Tableau visualization maps renter housing costs across states over time. We are able to map at the state-level the average level of rent burdens over time. Rent burden is defined as the proportion of annual income households spend on their annual rent costs. The American Apartment Owners Association suggest spending between 25-30 percent of earned income on rental costs, which is repeated advice across platforms (). This means that when we see rental costs higher than 25-30 percent, people are increasing cost burdened by rent. Use the following interactive dashboard, which uses color to effectively guide you to which states have high cost burdens in orange, and low cost burdens in blue.

There is an additional two ways to gain further insights for each state from selecting states. The two bottom panels show ownership rates and median income for the state in each year.

Regional Breakdowns

This interactive Shiny app allows us to explore a regional breakdown of monthly rent and rent burden. The animation shows how mean rent has been increasing across all the regions, but is highest in absolute value in the West. There is an additional bar chart that shows the percentage change in housing costs from the lower end of years to the highest end.

Housing Patterns in the West

The above visualization found that in terms of mean monthly rent, the West had the highest value. We next evaluate which groups might be most effected by or driving these costs. The following is a graph of the affordability index in the west broken down by income groups. The income group is a division based on percentages, giving the bottom 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60, 60 to 80, and top 20 percent of earners. The affordability index takes the mean value of homes in the West and divides it by the mean income. This allows us to compare across income groups how the cost of homes relate to income.

The side-by-side comparisons yield a dark picture. From 2013 onwards, we see that for the bottom 20 percent of earners their affordability index has been increasing. In contrast, other income groups see a relatively similar affordability level from 2003 to 2023. This means that the people with the lowest earnings in the region have been hit the hardest by rising cost.

Race Disaggregated Trends

National Mean Rent by Race

Moving to a breakdown of housing costs by racial group at a national level, we first look at mean rent. This graph shows the linear trends for each racial group from 2003 to 2023, highlighting the 2008 Recession and 202 Covid-19 Pandemic years. We see that at a national level, Asians have had the sharpest increase in rent costs. However, it is possible that if scaled to income the rent may be a function of rising incomes. For other racial groups, the trend is less pronounced though we do see a positive trend across groups. This leads us to ask if as a ratio to income, how housing costs have shifted.

Affordability Index by Race

The following shows us that the prior insight may have been correct that incomes have risen for the Asian group since the ratio to income shows a flatter linear trend. In the lead up to the Great Recession, we see housing costs jumped for all groups. In more contemporary years, the 2020 Covid Pandemic appears to have caused the housing costs for Black and Asian people to have risen more sharply than any other racial group. This shows that costs are not evenly distributed across racial groups, but are borne by minorites most sharply.

Income Disaggregated Trends

We also want to understand how home ownership might be vary nation wide by different levels of income groups. The following heatmap shows an interesting pattern, where we map homeownership proportions by race and income group. For the top 20 percent of earners, there is by far the highest rate of ownership, reaching a high of 86 percent. In contrast, Black earners in the bottom 20 percent have the lowest ownership even compared to other racial groups in that income level. Over half of white people in the bottom 20 percent own their homes, which is 25 percent higher than their Black counterparts.

II. New York Housing

We now want to look more closely at one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, New York City. A large proportion of graduating UVA students face steep housing costs in their first year, and we want to now how those costs have been evolving.

The Ten Most Rent Burdened Cities

To understand where New York ranks in terms of housing costs, we take the weighted mean rent burdens in 2023 for every identifiable metropolitan area in the ACS. This then allows us to rank where the highest rental burdens by city. We see that both Rochester and New York City have close to 50 percent rent burdens on average. Many of these cities consistently rank as the least affordability cities to live due to high housing costs and low supply.

NYC Household Rent Cost Burdens

This stacked-area visualization shows how the composition of NYC households by rent-burden category has shifted from 2003 to 2023. While the share of households that are “not burdened” has gradually decreased, both the cost-burdened and severely burdened groups have grown over time. Interestingly, severe burdening rises sharply during economic shocks. We see this best after the Great Recession and again during the Covid-19 period. This means that rent affordability in NYC is highly sensitive to market downturns, and that many households live close enough to the edge that even small economic disruptions can push them into severe housing stress.

These trends indicate a massive structural problem for New York; even as NYC incomes have risen modestly, housing costs have risen much faster. For students considering moving to NYC after graduation, this shows us why rental affordability is still one of the city’s most pressing difficulties

NYC Housing Trends

This next visualization allows us to explore NYC’s rent burden trends more dynamically. We can then move across racial groups, income categories, and other metrics to see how housing costs evolve across different sections of the population. What we see matches the rest of our findings, where NYC’s rent-to-income ratios are high across the board and have become increasingly difficult for the lowest-income households to sustain.

We can also directly see the uneven pace of recovery following the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Some groups see stabilization or slight improvement, while others experience prolonged periods of elevated burden.

Homeownership in NYC by Racial Group

Homeownership in New York City looks very different depending on who you are, and this comparison between 2012 and 2023 makes that gap impossible to ignore. Even over a decade of economic growth and recovery, the overall ordering of groups barely changes: white and Asian New Yorkers have the highest homeownership rates, while Black and Hispanic households remain at the bottom. Despite rising incomes for some groups and more access to mortgage products after 2015, these gains don;t appear to have changed ownership. We believe this means that the barriers aren’t just income. It’s connected to historical differences in wealth, credit access, and neighborhood-level housing opportunities.

Because homeownership is one of the main ways families build wealth in the U.S., these significant gaps matter. They shape who is able to accumulate equity and who remains locked out of ownership entirely. For a place like New York, where buying a home is already extremely difficult, the chart shows that structural disadvantages continue to reproduce themselves even during periods when the market is supposed to be “improving.”

Conclusion

This project shows that while housing costs have risen nationwide, the burden is not evenly shared across places or across people. Regional differences, racial gaps, and disparities across the income distribution all point to a housing landscape where the highest pressures fall on those with the least ability to absorb them. Understanding these patterns is important to all ages, especially as students enter the housing market themselves and as policymakers attempt to respond meaningfully.