Consider This from NPR - The Rental Market Is Wild Right Now

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Listed rents are up 15% nationwide, and as much as 30% in some cities. At the same time, inflation and rising interest rates are pricing many buyers out of the housing market — increasing the pressure to rent. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports that competition is so intense, some people find themselves in bidding wars. The red-hot rental market could mean that more people face the threat of eviction at a time when most pandemic-era protections have disappeared. Carl Gershenson, Project Director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, explains how being evicted makes it all the more harder to find a new place to live. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The rental market is wild right now. It's the same story in so many places, not just New York or L.A., but Cincinnati. Some people saw their rent rise an extra $300 this month. Scottsdale. We found a tenant in Scottsdale whose rent is going up more than $800. Durham. A single mother says rent is going up $400 a month where she lives. Just listen to how this report began a few weeks ago on the

local Fox affiliate in Orlando. Fox certified Nestor Mato is live in Orange County this morning. And Nest, you were talking about how you yourself are seeing the impact. Yeah, my rent is going up more than $200 a month. And I was actually in an Uber talking to you about it. And you may remember and the driver turned around overhearing me and said, my rent's going up $400. According to Redfin, listed rents on available properties are up 15% nationally over a year ago. In some cities, they're up 30% or more. That's well over the rate of inflation. Given all that, it might seem cheaper to buy a place, except... I can't qualify for as much of a mortgage as I could have, and it's been really discouraging.

Kim Drotar is a public school teacher, and she told NPR she'd been looking to move out of her St. Louis rental apartment and buy a place somewhere her fifth-grade daughter could have more space. I just want some place where she can ride her bike and make friends with the neighbors and play with the kids, and they can come over. But lately, she can't find a home in her price range. And it's only getting more expensive to buy one. For years, there hasn't been enough new construction in the U.S.,

especially starter homes and small apartments. And now interest rates are going up and the Fed is hiking them further to fight inflation. The hope was that that would then lower the prices of houses, but it hasn't. And it's pricing me out of the market fully. Consider this. Between inflation and a wild housing market, some buyers are staying renters. And some renters now find themselves struggling with massive increases,

bidding wars, or threats of eviction. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, June 23rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. One stat that tells us something about the rental market right now is the number of people applying for a mortgage to buy a house. It's down 20% from a year ago.

That's a signal that with home prices continuing to go up and interest rates rising too, fewer people are trying to buy. That puts even more pressure on the rental market, where people are looking for places to live at a time when almost everything else costs more too. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports the competition is so intense it's led to bidding wars. When Sarah DaCosta had to find a new apartment in Chicago with her husband, baby, and dog, the whole process seemed weird. She'd never heard of an open house for a rental. And literally, people couldn't even fit in the house, and we got there right when it started. Then the listing agent said, submit your best and final. DaCosta's realtor said that meant

above asking. They'd already lost out once. So on this place that was actually smaller than the place we were living in before, and that was more expensive, we offered $150 more a month in rent and we still didn't get it. That happened again and again. And it's not only in big cities. In Port Orange, Florida, Brandon Sweetus is a 40-year-old single dad who was forced to move this year. First, his landlord said she wanted to sell the place. But when he started looking around... I found the house that I was living in posted for rent for $2,000, and I was paying $1,400. His rent was nearly half his take-home pay. Still, Suidas applied for another place that was $1,750 and was told he had a lock on it.

But the next day, the agent said, sorry, someone else had just offered $200 more. And the other people hadn't even seen the home. They just found it online and were willing to say, hey, we'll pay more and we'll pay now. Sweetus ended up finding a place at his same rent, but it's much smaller. There's no yard or garage and it's farther from his kid's school. He says he always hoped to eventually buy a house, a place where his children could always gather on holidays, bring the grandkids. The stuff that you think is normal, that you see in movies growing up. But now he feels that will never happen for him.

I've lived in the same area for the last 20 years. I know what these houses were renting for and what they were selling for. But, you know, what's occurred over the last two years, it's like just boom, destruction. A lot of factors led to this record surge in rental demand. what's occurred over the last two years, it's like just boom, destruction. A lot of factors led to this record surge in rental demand. Jessica Lautz of the National Association of Realtors says for more than a decade, the U.S. has not built enough new homes. Now, supply chain delays are slowing construction. Plus, those priced out of mortgages are staying put.

And on top of all this, millennials hitting their late 20s are eager to move out on their own. And so as we see this demand really push up against this huge wave of young adults starting household formation, there's no quick solution to this. So it's a good time to be a landlord. Bashir Nooruddin and his wife own nine rental units in Chicago, and one came open recently. He's had bidding wars, but he says they make him feel smarmy, so he no longer allows them. He actually prides himself on offering just under-market rent. But the last two years have been rough. One tenant stopped paying for most of a year and caused major damage to the apartment,

yet he couldn't evict her under the pandemic moratorium. And all that work from home was hard on refrigerators, washers, AC. I actually really can't remember how many appliances we replaced in the last year. So when a $1,200 a month three bedroom came open, he listed it for $1,785. In that apartment, I raised the rent by this drastic amount, not because that's what I would typically do, but because I have to recoup all these losses that I've had over the last year. The tight market and skyrocketing rents make it even tougher for those who've long struggled to find affordable housing. Lindsay Siegel is with Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Just the act of applying for apartments is incredibly unaffordable for low-income tenants

because once you pay that application fee once or twice or three times, you don't have any money left to pay that first month's rent or the security deposit, and then you're stuck. Dana Johnson just got terrible news. The 54-year-old lives northeast of Atlanta and faces eviction after losing her job as a property leasing agent last year. She can pay what's due with emergency rental aid, and she hoped to stay put so she doesn't face even higher rent, but the landlord decided she needs to move out. I'm just going to have to look for as many jobs as I can get because I have to pay rent that is astronomical right now, and it doesn't compensate with the salaries that are available.

She's already started her own company to sell doggy apparel, but if it doesn't all work out, she'll probably look for someone else who's also struggling and needs a roommate. NPR's Jennifer Ludden. Let's talk more about one thing you just heard there, emergency rental aid. During the pandemic, the federal government offered it in the billions, but now that money is almost all gone. And other pandemic protections like eviction moratoriums are mostly a thing of the past too. So what does all this mean for people vulnerable to eviction in a red hot rental market? The pandemic years were actually some of the only two years in recent

history where renters at the bottom of the market had the kinds of protections that they need to enjoy the housing security that renters in the rest of the United States have taken for granted for decades. That's Carl Gershenson of the Princeton Eviction Lab. He says most of the country is back to the pre-pandemic status quo of renter protections. I understand that one thing that is different about the housing market right now is that if you do lose your home, it's never been harder to find a place to live. What has changed? Vacancy rates are at historically low levels, I think around 5% last I looked. And at the same time, rents have been going up enormously. 2021 was one of the worst years in recent memory in terms of rent increases. I've seen estimates of around a 15% increase in rents, and 2022, as far as we can tell, it's not as bad as 2021. We're still seeing very severe increases in terms of rents. So there's high demand, there's low supply. There's also been

a change in the way evictions can follow somebody looking for a new place to live. Explain that. One trend, you know, over the last two decades is records from housing courts have been made electronic. It makes it so much easier for landlords to consult them, especially for a landlord to consult records from, you know, completely other different parts of the country. So maybe before you get an eviction in one city, you move to another city and the landlord doesn't know about your record. That's just not the case anymore, right? So for the last decade or so, it's been increasingly hard to shake an eviction on

your record. What's made that even easier is the number of companies that have started up that provide automated tenant screening services. And these are extremely blunt tools where a landlord just enters a name. Maybe you don't even have any information about the tenant other than a name. And the software just sort of gives a thumbs up, thumbs down, should you rent to this person. Even one eviction record associated with a name, and the software will just say, you don't need to rent to this person. There's 5% vacancy rate. There's plenty of other people that you could rent to. You've talked about this in terms of income levels. Are there also racial disparities here? Yes, very marked racial disparities. We know that about 20% of renter households are Black households, yet Black

households account for 33% of eviction filings. So Black renters are the only racial group that is overrepresented in terms of eviction filings. And as you might expect, White households are extremely underrepresented in terms of eviction filings. And of course, we know the US was built on decades of housing segregation and discrimination. And I'm sure what you're describing today is just one ripple of that. Exactly. So not only are black renters worse off than white renters in terms of eviction filings, but also we know that black Americans have extremely low home ownership rates compared to white Americans. I think about 40% of black Americans own their home compared to something around 70% of white

Americans. We've been hearing for a long time that the U.S. needs more affordable housing, but that is a long-term solution. Are there short-term ideas that can help solve this crisis? Yes. There are so many of them. I'm not even picky about which one. Well, that's encouraging that there's a lot of them. Yeah. At the bottom of it, it's about giving money to extremely low-income households. During the pandemic, we had extended unemployment insurance. We had child tax credits. We had emergency rental assistance. You can imagine universal basic income. You could put more money into housing choice vouchers.

You could increase federal support for public housing or even social housing. You know, just when it comes down to it, households that earn something like $25,000 a year or less, that's just not enough to rent a house or buy a house in contemporary markets. These families need income support. So there are a lot of solutions that involve helping people with money. Are there process-based solutions that change the way evictions work that might help solve this problem? Yes. I mean, we see very clearly that the more rights that you give to tenants,

the more likely they are to stay in their homes. And even on top of that, you know, it's not sufficient just to give rights to tenants. They also need help claiming those rights in court. So in Philadelphia, there is a program called the Eviction Diversion Program. And this program makes it mandatory that before a landlord files for eviction against a tenant, they have to go through a mediation process. So there's not going to be a mark on the. So there's not going to be a mark on the tenant's record that's going to make it harder for them to find housing in the long term. Instead, you sit down and you see if there's some sort of solution that the tenant and the

landlord can come to that does not involve getting the courts involved. In New York City, New York was, I believe, the first city to establish a right to counsel for tenants in housing court. Everyone knows that if you are in a criminal court, you have a right to counsel. But in civil courts like housing, there's no such right. And something like 90% of landlords show up with lawyers and fewer than 10% of tenants show up with lawyers. When one side has lawyers and the other doesn't, the side with lawyers almost always wins. So by providing tenants with counsel in civil courts, we see dramatically better outcomes for these tenants. In some cases, they get to stay in their homes. In other cases, maybe they do have to go, but they have longer to find a new house or the amount of back rent that they're ordered to pay is dramatically reduced.

And even these partial victories can really do a lot for the quality of life of a tenant going forward. Is the U.S. an outlier in this respect? Do other countries have models that are more successful? We are absolutely an outlier. If you look at our peer nations, we evict at rates that are two to three times higher than just about every country in Europe. Really, the only country that comes close to us is Canada. But we're still significantly higher than Canada. So what do all those other countries do differently from us?

A lot of them provide much more generous housing support, whether that be in terms of a check that you write to tenants to help them cover the rent, or just in the direct provision of public housing or social housing. We have a uniquely market-based housing regime in the United States. In fact, you know, the last two years, the pandemic era was really the only time we have seen a substantial decrease in the number of evictions. So we know it can be done, but we also know that it took sort of unprecedented federal action to actually cut into the eviction rate in the United States. That's Carl Gershenson of the Princeton Eviction Lab. Also in this episode, you heard reporting from NPR's Chris Arnold, who spoke to schoolteacher Kim Drotar in St. Louis.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.