U.S. running out of affordable places for people to live: media
NEW YORK, June 16– The housing market in the United States is split on divergent tracks and the country is “running out of affordable places for people to live,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday. “While one group of households is rushing to buy homes with savings built during the pandemic, another is being locked out of ownership as prices march upward– and those…
NEW YORK, June 16 (Xinhua) — The housing market in the United States is split on divergent tracks and the country is “running out of affordable places for people to live,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
“While one group of households is rushing to buy homes with savings built during the pandemic, another is being locked out of ownership as prices march upward — and those who bore the brunt of pandemic job losses remain saddled with debt and in danger of losing their homes,” said the report.
For the past year, lower-income tenants have relied heavily on government support to pay their monthly bills. These measures have helped about a third of renters used unemployment or stimulus payments to pay rent at some point during the pandemic, said the report, quoting the annual State of the Nation’s Housing Report released by the joint center on Wednesday.
However, it added, the majority of renters still had to borrow or draw on savings to cover bills, leaving them less able to weather future emergencies, much less save for personal investments or a down payment for a home.
According to the report, at the peak last year, the majority of states and several large cities had some sort of heightened eviction protection in place, though the degree of protection varied widely. Many of those safeguards have expired over the past few months, and the federal eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September is set to lapse at the end of the month. Enditem