Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability

In the United States, housing is most commonly considered unaffordable when a household spends more than 30% of income on housing and utilities. Although easy to calculate, it fails to account for how other categories of essential expenses affect income available to spend on housing. This article compares the ratio-based approach with shelter poverty, a measure that accounts for these elements, evaluating differences in results between the two methods among renters in Ohio. Shelter poverty identifies a higher rate of households in economic distress due to housing market conditions. Further, the average “affordability gap” is four times higher using the shelter poverty than with the 30% threshold. Relative to shelter poverty, the ratio method underestimates the unaffordability of rental housing in economically distressed areas, as measured by median household income, and modestly overestimates it in high-income areas.