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Between a (Rental) Rock and a Hard Place

by Peter Thomas Ricci

The unaffordable simply becomes more unaffordable in today’s whacky rental landscape.

At the start of July, we reported on the latest rental data from Reis, which found that the nation’s rental market continued to grow more expensive and exclusive through 2014’s second quarter, with rents rising and vacancies falling.

That’s great news for landlords and for rental listing agents (not to mention advocates of homeownership), but it’s also putting quite a few consumers in a bind – and courtesy of new analysis from Trulia, we have a pretty good idea of just how big of a bind we’re dealing with.

Rising Rents + Stagnating Incomes = Issues

It’s the same quagmire that we reported on involving homeownership – because incomes have not risen at nearly the rate of rents, the cost of rental housing has vaulted into the stratosphere in many metro areas, and consumers are now devoting sizable portions of their monthly income to housing.

For an idea on how sizable those portions are, and how it differs across metro areas, we put together a great infographic below, which utilizes the latest data from Trulia:

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