{"database": "openregs", "table": "crs_reports", "rows": [["R49457", "Measuring Housing Affordability", "2026-10-01T04:00:00Z", "2026-10-03T05:25:49Z", "Active", "Reports", "Mark P. Keightley, Maggie McCarty", "Housing Finance, Housing Tax Policy, Social Services, Housing Budget & Appropriations", "Housing affordability is an area of interest for policymakers and the public. There are a variety of ways to measure housing affordability, with the most common being the housing-cost-to-income ratio approach (hereinafter, \u201cratio approach\u201d). This approach considers housing \u201cunaffordable\u201d if housing costs exceed 30% of household income. Recently, the residual income approach\u2014which defines housing as \u201caffordable\u201d if the difference between household income and housing costs is sufficient to pay for some socially acceptable basket of non-housing necessities\u2014has gained attention from researchers due to its ability to address some of the shortcomings of the ratio approach. Understanding the conceptual and empirical differences between these approaches is important, because the concept of what is affordable influences subsidy levels in federal assistance programs, research on family economic well-being, and reports on the health of the nation\u2019s housing market.\nThis report compares the ratio and residual income approaches to measuring housing affordability. While these two measures often show similar overarching housing affordability patterns, they can generate different estimates of the extent of affordability challenges for certain subpopulations. Using data from the 2023 American Community Survey, CRS found the following among non-elderly U.S. households:\nCompared to the residual income approach, the ratio approach estimates lower rates of housing affordability challenges for all households, low-income households, and households with children.\nApproximately 53.0% of households did not face housing affordability challenges under either approach, 31.8% faced challenges under both approaches, and 15.2% faced challenges according to only one of the approaches.\nUnder the residual income approach, it would require more than three times as much additional household income\u2014from work or public subsidies\u2014to alleviate housing affordability challenges than is required under the ratio approach. \nCRS analysis of the 2023 American Housing Survey found that the two approaches produce similar results when estimating the percentage of households facing various indicators of housing insecurity (e.g., difficulty affording housing payments, threat of eviction). Additionally, both approaches found that households with housing affordability challenges were approximately twice as likely as those without such challenges to report having difficulty making housing payments and experiencing involuntary moves. Thus, even though the housing-cost-to-income ratio may not fully capture the prevalence of housing affordability challenges in the United States, it does serve to reflect households\u2019 experiences with housing insecurity. \n", "https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R49457/R49457.2.pdf", "https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/HTML/R49457.html"]], "columns": ["id", "title", "publish_date", "update_date", "status", "content_type", "authors", "topics", "summary", "pdf_url", "html_url"], "primary_keys": ["id"], "primary_key_values": ["R49457"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.30533410608768463, "source": "Federal Register API & Regulations.gov API", "source_url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1", "license": "Public Domain (U.S. Government data)", "license_url": "https://www.regulations.gov/faq"}