Rents are going up, which is bad news for tenants staring down eviction.
The median monthly charge on a vacant rental saw a $185 annual jump in March, Bloomberg News reported, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In April, rents rose nearly 2 percent, the biggest jump since 2017.
Those increases, along with the uneven economic recovery and recently overturned eviction ban, puts pressure on lower-income families, who typically spend 40 percent of their income on rent.
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t have the legal authority to ban evictions last year. The moratorium, which is set to last until June, gave protection to those who’d lost their jobs.
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Expensive urban markets like Manhattan and San Francisco saw a steep decline in rent earlier in the pandemic, as those who could afford to fled the city to work remotely elsewhere.
Meanwhile, rents in cities that people fled to — such as Richmond, Virginia; Fresno, California and Dayton, Ohio — increased as vacancies plunged and prices soared.
Now, prices are rising in all the places they fell last year. One economist told the publication that the rebound is happening more quickly than expected.
Americans can expect the median increase in rent to be around 5.3 percent, close to the highest in the past decade.
[Bloomberg News] — Cordilia James