In April, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released a new report analyzing the challenges that tenants are facing in the United States, including Texas, utilizing the most recently available American Community Survey (ACS) Census data. “America’s Rental Housing 2026” report reveals that renters are facing all-time highs in housing cost burden. The report states that 22.7 million households spend more than 30 percent of income on rent and utilities. This includes 12.1 million severely cost-burdened households, those spending more than half their income on housing.
The report shows that among the nearly 48.3 million people living in cost-burdened households, 13 million are children under age 18 and 5.8 million are older adults. Since 2001, the amount of money available to lower-income renters each month after paying for housing and utilities has fallen by 60 percent to a record low of $210.
These records don’t just show up at the national level. In Texas, over half of renter households are cost burdened (50.5%), with over a quarter of renter households in Texas severely cost burdened, paying more than 50% of their income toward rent (25.8%). Our state is seeing cost burden highs that are soaring past pre-pandemic numbers in 2019.
The answer to why this is happening is multi-faceted, according to the report. For example, construction has slowed due to rising costs and labor shortages, and this is projected to create higher rates of cost burdened in the near future. Insurance and operating costs are also going up. In total, this is an environment where new construction will remain difficult to pencil out.
While Texas is currently focusing almost exclusively on solutions like land use deregulation to address affordability, the report points to significantly more complex and diverse barriers to affordability for the demographics with the largest housing shortage, low-income households. The factors listed above, coupled with the instability of the overall economy following several hitches to United States supply chains including tariffs and shipping delays due to ongoing military conflicts, means that market rate solutions may struggle to majorly impact housing affordability for the near term, at least.
Unfortunately, the solutions that would make a direct and immediate impact are deeply underfunded. The report reminds us that only one in four income-eligible renter households who apply for federal housing assistance actually receives it, and even these insufficient funding levels are under constant threat. Earlier in 2026, the Trump administration proposed to gut federal housing assistance programs across the board, but thankfully congressional deliberations ended with status quo funding, for the time being. Yet the research team at Harvard suggests that without sizable expansion of federal housing support and funding, the 2.3 million households that receive Housing Choice Vouchers may not be able to meet their contracts. This is not even accounting for the estimated $169 billion is needed to preserve our public housing stock, which serves 800,000 households.
Much of the country and Texas’ housing stock is also under threat from disaster risk. Harvard says that there are 2.5 million units with rents below $600 (38 percent of such units) in areas with at least moderate expected annual losses from environmental hazards. Also at risk are 660,000 project-based HUD units (30 percent), including 380,000 project-based Section 8 units, 220,000 public housing units, and 56,000 units of supportive housing for older adults and persons with disabilities.
These are the realities that we must form solutions from. Complex problems require a diverse toolkit of solutions, but too frequently housing policy discussions are swamped by the single tool of the deregulatory agenda, which has failed to serve the needs of struggling low-income households over and over again.
But we can get involved to solve this issue; states are moving to act while the federal government may not be equipped to. Harvard points out that Washington joined California and Oregon in capping rent increases, with substantial exemptions for new units. Additionally 29 states and 51 localities passed tenant protections in 2024 and 2025, ranging from right to counsel and just cause eviction standards to policies that limit fees or prevent sharp rent increases.
For the 6 million renter households in Texas and millions of low-income tenants, these are the kind of measures we need to adopt to make housing truly affordable and accessible for all Texans. We cannot solely zone our way out of this issue. Let’s treat this like the emergency it is and put our money where our mouth is.
You can read the whole report below or on the Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies website.
