According to HousingWire, researchers at the Urban Institute have found that rental affordability is reaching crisis levels across the country. Their analysis of data collected from 2019 through 2025 shows that one in five working-age renters missed rent payments or paid late at some point in 2025, the highest percentage since the survey began tracking this measure. This represents a significant jump from the previous year, when the figure stood at 16.5 percent.
What's particularly striking about these findings is that the struggle isn't limited to the lowest-income households. While lower-income renters continue to face the most severe challenges, middle-income renters experienced the sharpest increase in payment difficulties, more than doubling from around 14 percent in 2024 to just over 21 percent in 2025. This tells us the affordability problem is spreading across income levels in ways we haven't seen before.
Beyond rent itself, renters are also getting squeezed by utility costs. Just over 20 percent of working-age renters reported being unable to pay their full heating and electricity bills in 2025. When you combine struggling with rent and struggling with utilities, you're looking at households with very little financial cushion left for emergencies or unexpected expenses.
The research also included seniors for the first time, finding that just under 9 percent of renters aged 65 and older reported difficulty paying rent in 2025. The Urban Institute researchers noted that this represents a baseline for tracking older adults' housing challenges going forward, suggesting they'll be monitoring this group more closely in future years.
What I'm seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay is that these national trends are playing out in real time in our rental markets. The squeeze on middle-income renters is particularly relevant here, where housing costs have always been steep but are now creating real hardship for people who thought they were financially stable. When renters can't reliably cover their basic monthly obligations, it affects everything from property owner cash flows to neighborhood stability, and it reinforces my conviction that we need serious policy attention at every level to address the affordability crisis.
