Geographies and determinants of rent burden: A regional economic analysis of the U.S. metropolitan landscape

Rental housing affordability, a growing topic in interdisciplinary scholarship, remains relatively peripheral to geography and regional science. This article focuses on geographies of rent burden and factors affecting it at the metropolitan level in the conterminous U.S. By conducting cartographic and regression analyses, we examine relationships between rent burden and numerous related aspects derived from scholarly work. Besides offering a new measurement of rent burden, we put a special emphasis on regional economic specializations as potential predictors of rent burden’s intensity. The relationship between these two have not been studied in existing scholarship. Our results indicate that the most consistent determinants of more intense rent burden in numerous models include higher housing values and poverty rates, substantial shares of racial/ethnic minorities, and family structure represented by lower percent married. Regarding economic specializations, we find that manufacturing is a strong predictor of lower rent burden in most models, with its effect demonstrating an opposite direction—higher rent burden occurs in metropolises not specializing in manufacturing. Simultaneously, metropolises with substantial concentrations of employment in (i) education and medicine and (ii) arts, entertainment, and recreation exhibit higher rent burden and most of these metropolises are mid- and small-sized.