Rental Housing Affordability in the Southeast: Data from the Sixth District

Abstract

The availability of stable and affordable housing in quality neighborhoods provides an opportunity for household economic mobility and a competitive advantage for local jurisdictions. The Southeast, as in other areas of the country, has experienced a persistent affordable housing shortage since the Great Recession. This is due in part to historically low homeownership rates, rents that have increased at a faster rate than income, and the loss of subsidized and unsubsidized rental units due to abandonment and conversion.

Real Property Supremacy: Manufactured Housing and the Limits of Inclusion through Finance

“…Recently, attention has been paid to the role of larger investors in contract selling (Carpenter, Lueders, and Thayer 2017;Akers and Seymour 2018;Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] 2020;Teresa 2022). This focus on corporate contract selling, although important, is also a function of data availability, as a likely much larger, but uncounted, number of contract sales involve small-scale sellers who produce much fainter data trails (Carpenter, Lueders, and Thayer 2017).…”

“…Recently, attention has been paid to the role of larger investors in contract selling (Carpenter, Lueders, and Thayer 2017;Akers and Seymour 2018;Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] 2020;Teresa 2022). This focus on corporate contract selling, although important, is also a function of data availability, as a likely much larger, but uncounted, number of contract sales involve small-scale sellers who produce much fainter data trails (Carpenter, Lueders, and Thayer 2017). This data deficiency was exacerbated by the removal of "land contract"related questions from the American Housing Survey in 2019, and is a reflection of "uneven reporting requirements and adherence to these requirements within and between states" (Carpenter, George, and Nelson 2020, 38).…”

“…The second part is based on interviews with nonprofit and social service practitioners, as well as semistructured interviews with MH residents (seventy-one) and park managers or owners (three) in Tucson, Arizona, documenting semiformal financial practices (e.g., contract sales and lease or rent-to-own contracts). Such nonmortgage home lending has a long and checkered history in the United States, but remains a rarely studied part of contemporary housing markets and struggles (Carpenter, Lueders, and Thayer 2017;Akers and Seymour 2018;Immergluck 2018;Jang-Trettien 2022). We show how the state's privileging of real property and mortgage markets produces conditions where constrained housing options, semiformal financial practices, and unique tenure forms combine to create and reproduce intersecting forms of vulnerability at the lower end of the MH market.…”

Rent burden determinants in hot and cold housing markets of Davidson and Shelby counties, Tennessee

“…The share of low‐income tenants with rent burden increased as well, with the greatest rise of 4.9 percent in Memphis (Immergluck et al, 2016). Another report by FRBA documented that in Memphis the percentage of extremely low‐ and very low‐income renter households that were burdened and extremely burdened was 26 and 51 percent respectively; for Nashville, these figures were 30 and 47 percent (Carpenter et al, 2018).…”

“…This study, to our knowledge, is the first one to thoroughly analyze and compare two very distinct housing markets in terms of rent burden and its determinants. Relatively recent research has focused mostly on calculating the extent of rent burden by utilizing households from surveys (Colburn & Allen, 2018;Eggers, 2010;Susin, 2007); by studying renters in the housing choice voucher program (Dawkins & Jeon, 2017;Mast, 2014;McClure, 2005) or tenants residing in low-income housing tax credit developments | SAMARIN ANd SHARMA (Williamson, 2011); by examining single municipalities (Ray et al, 2014) or entire and multiple MSAs (Carpenter et al, 2018;Lens, 2018). Studies comparing select counties/cities are limited as opposed to those using households.…”