This paper examines the housing affordability crisis using a residual income approach to identify renter households whose housing expenses are too high and who lack the income to enable them to meet a basic but comfortable standard of living.
The Self-Sufficiency Standard provides an alternative tool to understanding housing cost burden. A recent report, Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability, used the Self-Sufficiency Standard to evaluate operationalize the idea of shelter poverty by evaluating housing affordability after accounting for the minimum costs for other essentials, instead of relying solely on the widely accepted measurement for housing burden– renters paying above 30% of total income– which does not provide the full picture of housing affordability.
The 30-percent of income standard is a widely used and accepted measure of the extent of housing affordability problems across the country.
