From the Associated Press:
Krystal Guerra’s Miami apartment has a tiny kitchen, cracked tiles, warped cabinets, no dishwasher and hardly any storage space.
But Guerra was fine with the apartment’s shortcomings. It was all part of being a 32-year-old graduate student in South Florida, she reasoned, and she was happy to live there for a few more years as she finished her marketing degree.
That was until a new owner bought the property and told her he was raising the rent from $1,550 to $1,950, a 26% increase that Guerra said meant her rent would account for the majority of her take-home pay from the University of Miami.
“I thought that was insane,” said Guerra, who decided to move out. “Am I supposed to stop paying for everything else I have going on in my life just so I can pay rent? That’s unsustainable.”
Guerra is hardly alone. Rents have exploded across the country, causing many to dig deep into their savings, downsize to subpar units or fall behind on payments and risk eviction now that a federal moratorium has ended.
In the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, median rent rose an astounding 19.3% from December 2020 to December 2021, according to a Realtor.com analysis of properties with two or fewer bedrooms. And nowhere was the jump bigger than in the Miami metro area, where the median rent exploded to $2,850, 49.8% higher than the previous year....
....MUCH MORE
In this month's CPI the shelter component which represents just under 1/3 of the index (32.563%) is pegged at having increased 4.4% in the last twelve months.
That's from the always interesting Table 2.
