Affordable Rental Housing in Rural Texas

Trends in U.S. and States in Dallas Fed’s District

Nationally, the share of renter households that are housing-cost burdened increased 0.6 percentage points between 2009 and 2017.[7] That means nearly 3 million additional households were struggling to pay for housing in 2017. Over this same period, however, the share of homeowners who were housing-cost burdened decreased more than 6 percentage points nationally. As a result, more than 4.5 million owner households were no longer struggling to pay for their housing in 2017. These trends and the disparity in recent experiences between renters and owners hold true in both metro and nonmetro areas.[8]

Table 1: Change in Housing-Cost-Burden Rates from 2009 to 2017: All of U.S.

A review of data for states in the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ district (Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico) reveals that some housing-affordability trends in these states over this period are consistent with national trends (Table 2).[9]

As in the nation, fewer homeowners—both metro and nonmetro—in the three Dallas Fed district states were burdened by housing costs from 2009 to 2017. Also consistent with national trends, a greater share of nonmetro renters in Louisiana and New Mexico struggled with housing costs in 2017 than in 2009. Texas did not experience the same uptick in the nonmetro rental-cost burden, though the share of cost-burdened rural renters in the lowest-earning cohorts did climb.

Table 2: Change in Housing-Cost-Burden Rates from 2009 to 2017: Dallas Fed District States

The overall divergence in housing-cost-burden trends between owners and renters is partially the result of a shift in housing choice, with a greater proportion of households renting homes in recent years than in the past. That trend holds true in the Dallas Fed’s district states (Table 3).

Table 3: Change in Renter Households from 2009 to 2017: Dallas Fed District States