Racial disparity in exposure to housing cost burden in the United States: 1980–2017

Abstract

This article uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyse Black–White differences in housing cost burden exposure among renter households in the USA from 1980 to 2017, expanding understanding of this phenomenon in two respects. Specifically, we document how much this racial disparity changed among renters over almost four decades and identify how much factors associated with income or housing costs explain Black–White inequality in exposure to housing cost burden. For White households, the net contribution of household, neighbourhood and metropolitan covariates accounts for much of the change in the probability of housing cost burden over time. For Black households, however, the probability of experiencing housing cost burden continued to rise throughout the period of this study, even after controlling for household, neighbourhood and metropolitan covariates. This suggests that unobserved variables like racial discrimination, social networks or employment quality might explain the increasing disparity in cost burden among for Black and White households in the USA.

Keywords:

• Housing cost
• racial inequality
• cost burden

Acknowledgements

Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant, P2C HD042828, to the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unlike other studies of housing cost burden, this study excludes utility costs from the total housing cost calculation. This exclusion is due to the fact that utility payments are omitted from the PSID from 1983 to 1998 (Li et al., 2010). As a result, both the prevalence and average rent burden figures presented in this study are lower than other measures that include utility costs as part of the household housing cost calculation.

2 Logistic regression models produced substantively identical results to linear probability models given our focus on average predictions and marginal effects. Accordingly, we present LPMs for interpretability and to facilitate comparisons between model specifications given the limitations therein associated with coefficients from non-linear regressions (Allison, 1999).

3 We present marginal predictions for odd years in order to keep a consistent x-axis unit amidst the PSID’s change in 1997 from one-year interview intervals to two-year intervals.

4 Significant differences at the p < .05 level are denoted by the confidence interval for one series not overlapping the point estimate for the other series.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Hess

Chris Hess is a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell University Department of Policy Analysis and Management. His research explores the suburbanization of residential segregation by race and ethnicity, disparities in household housing cost burden exposure and the role of online housing markets in the housing search process.

Gregg Colburn

Gregg Colburn is an assistant professor in the Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington. His research focuses on housing markets, housing policy, affordable housing, and homelessness.

Kyle Crowder

Kyle Crowder is a sociologist and urban demographer who studies the causes and consequences of residential stratification. His most recent research focuses on the subtle social dynamics that perpetuate residential segregation by race, patterns and drivers of environmental inequality, and the effects of pollution and neighborhood distress on health.

Ryan Allen

Ryan Allen is an associate professor of Community and Economic Development in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Urban and Regional Planning program. Allen's research focuses on housing and community development issues. In particular, he investigates housing affordability, historical aspects of public housing and neighborhood change. In addition, Allen conducts research and teaches about the experience of immigrants in cities and suburbs of the United States.