June 24, 2015
Emily Badger had an interesting discussion of the decline of homeownership in Wonkblog. However the piece neglected to mention one of the most important reasons why people might opt to rent rather than own: the insecurity of their employment situation.
It is usually not a good idea to spend the large overhead costs associated with buying a home unless you have a secure job where you can expect to stay many years into the future. As stable jobs become rarer in the economy (median job tenure has fallen sharply over the last three decades), homeownership is likely to make sense for a smaller segment of the population. If the trend towards shorter job tenure continues we should see further declines in the ownership rate in the years ahead.
The piece also errors in implying that rental prices are rising substantially faster than other prices. For these sorts of comparisons it is best to use the owner equivalent rent (OER) measure, which pulls out utilities that are often included in the rent measure.
The graph shows that this measure of rent has somewhat outpaced core inflation over the last few years, but this followed several years in which OER rose less rapidly than the core rate of inflation. Since January of 2006, the OER has risen by 3.0 percentage points more than the core inflation rate.
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