The role of government benefits in reducing housing cost burdens, 2009 – 2022

Measures of housing cost burden based solely on pretax cash income cannot capture how in-kind benefits supplement or expenses exhaust resources available for housing. We thus apply a broader definition of income, following the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which considers cash income, in-kind benefits, taxes, and expenses, to measure housing burden in the United States. Using the American Community Survey, we estimate cost burdens among renters over time and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The picture of burden changes when a broader definition of resources is used, especially among the most financially insecure households. We use this alternative SPM resource-based definition of burden to show how anti-poverty policies impact the prevalence of rent burden. When comparing measures of burden based on SPM resources, we find that pretax cash income underestimates the prevalence of burden, overstates the decline in burden between 2009 and 2019, and fails to account for major policy changes in the social safety net.