Losing Ground

The combined costs of housing and transportation in the nation’s largest 25 metro areas have swelled by 44 percent since 2000 while incomes have failed to keep pace, according to a new report from the Center for Housing Policy—the research affiliate of the MacArthur-supported National Housing Conference—and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. Losing Ground: The Struggle of Moderate-Income Households to Afford the Rising Costs of Housing and Transportation draws the latest five-year data from the American Communities Survey, looking at information for families in the 25 largest U.S. metros and including additional analysis for Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The report details the challenges that American households face as the combined costs of housing and transportation consume an ever-larger share of household incomes, and puts forth policies that can help reverse the trend by making housing and transportation affordable to families at all income levels.