Editorial

Within the last two decades, renting has become a much more popular way of accessing housing in the United States.Nearly 10 million more American households rented their homes in 2022 than in 2002, and renters now make up more than 34% of the whole.Growing rentership has been accompanied by a dwindling supply of low-cost rentals, and a rising share of households that carry severe rent burdens (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2023).The COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized the market, suddenly interrupting income for many renters (and consequently for their landlords), but also ushering in bold interventions such as eviction moratoria.This issue of Housing Policy Debate features the latest research on rental housing in the United States and has implications for rental housing policy at every level of government.Three articles set the stage by interrogating how rental affordability is measured and experienced.In "'The Rent Eats First': Rental Housing Unaffordability in the United States," Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, Alexander Hermann, and Sophia Wedeen ask how many renter households we would consider to be living in unaffordable housing if we calculated residual income (money left over after paying for rent) rather than the traditional rent-burden formula.They find that millions of American households (especially those with children) cannot cover basic nonhousing expenses after paying rent, even if they are not rent burdened per se.Matthew Brooks' "Measuring America's Affordability Problem" complements this analysis, calculating a wide array of affordability measures and examining how some measures mute or amplify racial disparities in access to affordable housing.Finally, Jovanna Rosen, Victoria Ciudad-Real, Sean Angst, and Gary Painter follow with "Rental Affordability, Coping Strategies, and Impacts in Diverse Immigrant Communities," drawing on focus groups to understand the special constraints that keep immigrant and refugee households in unaffordable rental housing.A second set of articles examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected renters, landlords, and rental housing policy in the United States.Michael Manville, Paavo Monkkonen, Michael Lens, and Richard Green, in "Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response: Evidence from COVID-19," find that tenants who missed rent payments in the first year of the pandemic usually did so because they had lost work or income (not because they were withholding rent to pay for other things).Eviction threats were rare during this time, but small landlords were the most likely to threaten delinquent tenants with eviction.Eric Seymour adds to the evidence base with "Corporate Landlords and Pandemic and Prepandemic Evictions in Las Vegas."Like Manville and colleagues, Seymour finds that smaller landlords were often more likely to evict tenants during the pandemic than their larger, corporate peers.The worst offenders in Las Vegas, though, are extended-stay properties, which evicted at high rates before the pandemic and simply accelerated evictions once COVID-19 struck.We next turn to the federal and state response with "COVID-19 Housing