CBS News
Affording a home in the U.S. increasingly seems like an impossible dream
It is a desperate time for many Americans struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Erica Duvall often feels like keeping up with the rent on the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her 9-year-old daughter is an “impossible” task.
“I definitely make the most money that I’ve ever made…and it’s still not enough to keep up,” the single mom said. Duvall said her rent went up $100 when she renewed her lease in December, and she expects a similar hike this winter.
“When you’re working as hard as some of us work and you still can’t stay on top of it, it’s really hard to not get to the point where it’s like why…am I working so hard,” she said.
Duvall, 29, is far from alone. According to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, rent growth has slowed in recent months, but is still up 26% since early 2020. Recent data from the Census Bureau also shows that 21 million households — nearly half of all renters — were cost-burdened last year, meaning they spent more than a third of their income on rent.
Coupled with stubborn inflation on things like groceries and car insurance, many Americans are forced into making difficult choices between paying rent and paying the bills.
“It’s hard to budget when [the price of] everything is constantly changing,” Duvall said.
Well Kept Designs
Rent around the U.S. varies widely, from pricey urban digs where jobs are more plentiful to low-cost rural areas where employment is harder to find. With new housing inventory coming on the market in the South, year-over-year, for example, rents have actually declined in metros like Austin, Jacksonville, and San Diego, according to August data from Redfin.
But with housing inventory for homebuyers remaining tight in the Northeast and Midwest, rents in some cities have increased by upwards of 10% since last year because of strong demand.
“The market’s been absolutely nuts”
Buyers are making hard decisions, too. New parents and first-time homebuyers Eli and Amanda Enav thought they would outgrow their New York City rental and purchase a home in 2022. Tight market conditions had kept them on the sidelines for years.
“We were waiting for prices to come down or interest rates to come down. Neither of those things have happened,” husband Eli said.
Home prices are up 29% since 2020, with the price of a typical home jumping from $331,807 to $429,324 this year, according to data from Realtor.com.
Meanwhile, like bags of chips and cartons of ice cream, homes are not immune from shrinkflation, resulting in buyers paying more for less. While homes have shrunk an average of 126 square feet since 2019, over that period their price has risen $123,655, according to a CBS News analysis of Realtor.com data.
In better news for house hunters, mortgage rates have dipped from highs around 8% last October and now hover in the 6% territory. Experts expect borrowing costs to continue trending down, as Federal Reserve officials are widely expected to cut its benchmark interest rate during their meeting on September 18.
With a new baby and a dog crowding their two-bedroom apartment, the Enav family made a tough -— and expensive — decision.
“We figured we have to move on with our lives and couldn’t just wait for things to turn around in our favor,” Eli said. “We made the decision [that] it’s time to buy, even if it’s at an inflated cost.”
The married couple found a house in New Jersey, although with a bigger price tag than they had hoped.
“The market’s been absolutely nuts,” wife Amanda said. “It’s going to be a bit more of a burden than we originally anticipated.”
Massive housing shortage
Why has the housing market been so tight for so long? A key factor is historic shortage of homes for sale. According to data from Zillow, that shortfall grew from 4.3 million homes in 2021 to 4.5 million homes in 2022.
“We built fewer homes in the 2010s than in any decade going all the way back to the 1960s, and because we built so few homes, we really didn’t build for the new families that would be forming,” explained Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. “Millennials are the largest generation, so we have all of this added demand for housing when we really just didn’t plan for it.”
“We didn’t build enough, and that is why we have this 4 million-plus unit housing shortage,” Fairweather added.
For many, that may mean lowering their expectations. According to a CBS News poll, 32% of voters 18-29 years old and half of 30-64 year olds feel they won’t ever reach the American Dream, rooted in the deeply entrenched aspiration of having a place you can call your own. For voters under 30, 82% believe it’s harder to buy a home now than in previous generations.
Fairweather said that over the long run the changing housing market will push people away from traditional single-family homes.
“That kind of a home, especially in close proximity to jobs, to the city, is not going to get more affordable,” she explained. “Those homes are really going to become a thing of the past. And what we’ll see is more smaller homes, more townhomes, more multiplexes, more condos, and those will start to become more accessible, more affordable.”
TRENTON, N.J. — Democratic Newark City Council President LaMonica McIver has defeated Republican small businessman Carmen Bucco in a contest in New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District that opened up because of the death of Rep. Donald Payne Jr. in April.
McIver will serve out the remainder of Payne’s term, which ends in January. She and Bucco will face a rematch on the November ballot for the full term.
McIver said in a statement Wednesday that she stands on the “shoulders of giants,” naming Payne as chief among them.
She cast ahead to the November election, saying the right to make reproductive health choices was on the ballot as well as whether the economy should benefit the wealthy or “hard working Americans.”
“I will fight because the purpose of politics and the purpose of our vote is to give the people of our communities and our nation a bold voice,” she said.
Bucco congratulated McIver on the victory in a statement but said he’s looking forward to the rematch in November.
“I am not going anywhere,” he said in an email. “We still have a second chance to make district 10 great again!”
Who are LaMonica McIver and Carmen Bucco?
McIver emerged as the Democratic candidate in a crowded field in the July special election. A member of the city council of New Jersey’s biggest city since 2018, she also worked for Montclair Public Schools as a personnel director and plans to focus on affordability, infrastructure, abortion rights and “protecting our democracy,” she told The Associated Press earlier this summer.
Bucco describes himself on his campaign website as a small-business owner influenced by his upbringing in the foster system. He lists support for law enforcement and ending corruption as top issues.
The 10th District lies in a heavily Democratic and majority-Black region of northern New Jersey. Republicans are outnumbered by more than 6 to 1.
It’s been a volatile year for Democrats in New Jersey, where the party dominates state government and the congressional delegation.
Among the developments were the conviction on federal bribery charges of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who has denied the charges, and the demise of the so-called county party line — a system in which local political leaders give their preferred candidates favorable position on the primary ballot.
Democratic Rep. Andy Kim, who’s running for Menendez’s seat, and other Democrats brought a federal lawsuit challenging the practice as part of his campaign to oust Menendez, who has resigned since his conviction.
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CBS News
Sean “Diddy” Combs at same Brooklyn detention center that held R. Kelly, Sam Bankman-Fried, other high-profile inmates
A second judge refused to grant bail to Sean “Diddy” Combs on Wednesday and he could remain in federal custody at a Brooklyn detention center until his trial for sex trafficking charges. Combs joins other high-profile inmates, such as singer R. Kelly, fallen cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, rapper Ja Rule —even Al Sharpton served a brief stint— who were held at the same federal detention center.
Notorious for its horrible conditions —inmates won a $10 million class action settlement after enduring frigid conditions during an 8-day blackout in 2019— the waterfront industrial complex, MDC Brooklyn, houses 1,200 inmates.
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
Violence and corruption have long plagued the facility; U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown of the Eastern District of New York wrote the detention center had “dangerous, barbaric conditions” in a recent sentencing opinion. Two inmates were stabbed to death in recent months and several correction officers have been convicted for smuggling contraband and accepting bribes.
Combs joins a list of high-profile personalities that have landed at the MDC Brooklyn, partly because the city’s other federal detention center, MDC New York, closed in 2021, also due to horrible conditions. The disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in his cell there in 2019. “Numerous and serious” instances of misconduct among corrections staff gave Epstein the opportunity to kill himself, a subsequent federal watchdog investigation found.
Kelly sued the federal detention center in 2022 for wrongly putting him on suicide watch after his sentencing. Kelly sought $100 million because he said the detention center knew he wasn’t suicidal after he was convicted in 2021 for racketeering and violating the Mann Act, which bars transporting people across state lines for prostitution.
Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Former crypto billionaire Bankman-Fried survived on bread, water and sometimes peanut butter when he was in the MDC Brooklyn, his attorney said, because the detention center continued to serve him a “flesh diet” despite requests for vegan dishes.
Ja Rule stayed at the MDC Brooklyn for a brief time before being released after serving most of his two-year sentence for illegal gun possession. Most of his prison time was spent in a state prison in New York.
Sharpton served a 90-day sentence in 2001 and went on a hunger strike for protesting the U.S. Navy bombing of the island of Vieques, in Puerto Rico.
Combs was taken into custody on Monday and according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday he was charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution.
His attorney Marc Agnifilo told CBS News, “It’s impossible to prepare for a trial from where he is,” after a first federal judge denied Combs bail on Tuesday.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky agreed with prosecutors who argued the hip-hop mogul, who is accused of using his business empire as a criminal enterprise to conceal his alleged abuse of women, is a flight risk and poses an ongoing threat to the safety of the community.
Agnifilo said the part of the detention center where Combs is being held is “a very difficult place to be.”
contributed to this report.
