The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers households to be burdened if they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. The number of households burdened by housing costs provides a measure of the cost of living and a proxy for evaluating disposable income levels in a community. Such an indicator can provide important insights into a community's social and economic health.
We have included both owners and renters in this indicator. It should be noted that generally speaking, the rate of housing cost-burdened renters is about twice that of owners. The data indicate that the state's housing burden rates are lower than the nation as a whole but both have grown significantly over the years. The percentage of North Carolina households burdened by housing costs grew from 24.5 percent to 26.6 percent between 1990 and 2000. Over this same period, the national rate increased by a smaller amount, from 28.2 percent to 28.6 percent. For the 2010-2012 timeframe, 34.6 percent of North Carolina households - over 1.2 million - had high housing cost burdens.
Given their higher costs of living and greater concentrations of poverty it comes as no surprise that the vast majority of cities in our report had higher percentages of housing cost burdened households than the state as a whole. For the 2008-2010 timeframe only 12 cities had smaller percentages than the statewide average. Four cities (Wilson, Kinston, Wilmington, and Greenville) were in the top ten for housing cost burdened cities for every timeframe in this report. Two cities (Cary and Huntersville) were in the bottom ten for every timeframe in this report.
Apex, with the lowest percentage of housing cost-burdened households in the 2010-2012 timeframe, had over one in five households burdened by housing costs. Over this same period nearly half of Kinston's households were burdened by housing costs. In general, the places with the lowest percentages are in suburban cities in the Research Triangle and Charlotte regions.
Percentages for this category were calculated from the following sources and tables for the referenced years: