this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I appreciate you providing sources, genuinely, though I will point out the way the US officially measures poverty is laughable bullshit.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/dd73d4f00d8a819d10b2fdb70d254f7b/detailed-guidelines-2025.pdf
Yep, thats right, you live alone, and make or otherwise recieve more than $15.6k a year?
Not in poverty.
Also, the average paid rent in the US is ~1350 a month.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-rent-by-state
So... 1350 x 12 = 16,200, meaning a person below that is probably just literally homeless or nearly totally reliant on family or friends or the state for housing and food, as they have literally less than 0 money for food, on average, without some kind of assistance.
I would argue the actual US poverty line needs to be drawn at between where 200% and 300% of the current poverty line is.
That's not how averages work. The average "poor" person is not paying anywhere near the average rent.
Oh, if you have more accurate and precise data, please do provide it.
I know this one dude who pays $200/mo rent, but like what stat do we need here? 10th percentile of rent? https://personalfinancedata.com/national-housing-cost-percentile/?housing_costs=400&housing_type=1#results I found this, which suggests that 10th percentile is very close to $500/mo
So... yeah, this is not direct, actual direct rent data, its got who knows what kind of weighting manipulation going on, and its ~10 years old, and its spread out over a 5 year timeframe, instead of being specific to each year.
I appreciate the attempt though, really.
Like, I'm not trying to sound like an ass, I am an econometrician, it genuinely is difficult for a person to find high quality, freely available data on this topic that is not some kind of statistically or methodologically dubious.
Doing statistics well, properly, is indeed quite difficult.
If your data source ain't great, neither are your conclusions, GIGO.
Anyway, broadly speaking, from 2015 to 2025, average and median US rent has something like doubled, and the other huge problem is that almost all the new apartments that have been built are all 'luxury' apartments, almost no one has built any affordable rental apartment housing in the last decade.
Indeed, if you look into what is even classified as an 'affordable' apartment, you will usually find that this means something like "rent is 1/3 of 80% of the Area Median Monthly Income"....and then you go look at the population income stats for that area, and you see that something like 20% to 40% of people in that area cannot afford that.
Meaning that 'affordable' apartments... aren't, really.
Yeh TBF I didn't look super hard for higher quality stats, but as you say, it's hard to get data. Ideally you'd want something comprehensive you could run ad-hoc queries on, but I didn't see anything like that 😅. I guess some subletting will be going on without any official paper trail, so the lower end of rent probably won't be visible anywhere (e.g. renting from relatives) -- I doubt there's any way to collate that data at all...
Yeah lol, if you know one dude who is paying $200 for rent, in the US, he almost certainly has to not be legally on the lease, or at best, in some kind of run down old 5 bedroom house or something...
And he'd almost certainly also be in a very low CoL state or city.
Like uh, from what I can find, but also cannot source with total confidence...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-rent-by-state
The cheapest studio apts in the country are around $650 a month, in like... Nebraska, slightly less in South Dakota.
The average cost rental price is $1325, but thats average for all areas, all kinds of apartments... my guess would be that average studio apt rent over the whole US is... about $950 - $1150?
I dunno, I'd have to pull in all their data sources and do my own calculations.
I cannot vouch for having personally validated the quality of these stats, but uh yeah.
And yeah, it is even more difficult to find actual data like this that also takes into account household size and income, all in one data set, also including and accounting things like all the varying kind of rent subsidies... so that you can actually do the income differentiation thing my original critic threw out as if this was trivial.
Also, its worth noting to my original comment... I did not include rent insurance, water, power, gas, other shit like pet rent, internet, phone, the fact that broke people likely have evictions from being broke and can thus functionally basically never rent again from the vast majority of landlords, they dont have the savings to put down a deposit and first months rent...
... and basically most of the funding that went toward gov and non profit rent assistance programs and pathway out of homelessness programs just got cut by the Trump admin.
Also, also: If data on a topic doesn't exist, then, to privileged, data wonk type people... the problem doesn't exist, is theoretical.
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, 10 or 50 million for whom we just don't bother to adequately study is a reason for me to be dismissive of the notion that anything could be wronf.