Rent burden is a situation when a renter‐occupied household spends a sizable portion of its income on housing costs. Using census tracts as the scale of analysis, this article examines rent burden determinants in Shelby and Davidson counties, the two largest of Tennessee. These counties differ substantially in terms of their housing markets, demographics, and the state of their economy. Mapping reveals distinct spatial patterns of rent burden and its geographic extent. Correlations and spatial regression analyses suggest that in both counties, a lack of access to an automobile, crowded living, and the presence of children in households similarly associate with higher rent burden. In contrast, educational attainment, race, and a lack of medical insurance do not demonstrate such consensus. Compared to Davidson County, race is a less crucial predictor of rent burden in Shelby County, likely due to its predominantly African American composition across different income groups. Besides, the positive effect of education is more pronounced in Shelby County. Results indicate that rent burden tends to be more of a socioeconomic class issue in Shelby County, whereas it is not as strongly associated with the socially disadvantaged in Davidson County.

Rental housing accommodates more than a billion tenants worldwide, and in recent years, rentership has been increasing in some countries. Given reduced access to homeownership in various locations due to several causes, it is critical to focus on rentership which has received relatively less attention compared to homeownership, especially within the geography scholarship. In this review article, we identify four key themes that have naturally emerged from the close examination of recent interdisciplinary literature on rentership and rental affordability. These include: (1) rental housing financialization; (2) the proliferation of single-family rentals resulting from the U.S. foreclosure crisis; (3) the determinants and consequences of rent burden; and (4) the relationship between rent burden and regional economic specialization. We discuss these themes and propose potential opportunities for the geographic analysis of rent burden, its determinants, and their relationships with regional economic specialization. We posit that the four identified themes have been developing in apparent isolation, thus making scholarship less consistent. Moreover, research on rent burden is disjointed in itself, which makes it difficult to establish a unified narrative and interlinked subthemes within the rent burden literature. Nonetheless, we contextualize the four themes in their application to geography and frame our discussion around the central notion of this article—rent burden.

This paper examines the relationships between crime-types and property values in the community areas of Chicago. Using a variety of unconventional web-based data sources, the authors use correlations, mapping, and regression analyses to find that while crime generally associates negatively with property values, not all crime-types have similar effects. Lower incidence of violent crimes and sex offenders in neighborhoods can have pronounced positive impacts on property values whereas certain types of property crimes gravitate toward neighborhoods with expensive homes. Further, crime rates may be similar or even higher than those in cheaper/disadvantaged areas. These types of offenses do not necessarily follow the price-dropping effect like other crime-types do on housing values. However, property crimes such as thefts do not follow this trend. They, thus, recommend that property crime alone should not be a factor when making decisions concerning home buying and/or where to live.

Scholarly work on rent burden, a rather scantily discussed topic within the broader realm of declining housing affordability, still lacks a firm theory. This article seeks to address this gap by developing a typology of U.S. metropolises which centers on their rent burden status and serves as an initial step toward theory building. We employ principal component and cluster analyses to identify seven distinct types of metropolises and their potential drivers of rent burden. An examination of these seven types suggests that rent burden has spatial randomness to it, since some metropolises in the seven types do not confine to specific geographies. Metropolises with pronounced specializations in education/medicine, information, and arts, recreation, and entertainment exhibit higher rent burden, whereas older Rust Belt metropolises have lower burden. Interestingly, emerging new-economy metropolises exhibit lower rent burden as well, likely reflecting the benefits of newer housing and a diverse economic base. Finally, rent burden, besides being an outcome of the housing demand/supply mismatch, is also a manifestation of income potentials that are affected in complex ways by local labor markets and regional economic specializations.

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