Americans are not the only ones struggling to pay rent. Residents throughout the UK, Canada and Spain also have high numbers of severely burdened renters.
That is according to a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies paper published in 2016 that examines rental costs in European and North American countries, Bloomberg reports. Data shows that even with government help it is not easy for developers to build cheap housing that the poor can afford, whether that is in the U.S. or globally. As a result, poor families are being squeezed by speculative investment, driving up residential real estate prices and forcing the poorest people to allocate more than 50% of their income to rent.
