Who Is Actually Stretched: Owners and Renters Compared, Town by Town

There is an old rule of thumb that housing should take about thirty percent of your income. It is arbitrary, it has been argued over for fifty years, and it is also the line the federal government uses to count who is stretched. By that line, this region divides sharply, and not along the boundary most people would guess.

Across the 101 towns, roughly 54% of renting households spend thirty percent or more of their income on housing. For owner households the figure is 26%. In the median town the renter figure is 49.6% against 24.2% for owners. Whichever way you cut it, renting here is roughly twice as likely to stretch a household as owning is.

Why Owning Looks Cheaper Than Renting Here

This gap is not evidence that buying is a better deal than renting, and reading it that way is the single biggest mistake available on this page. It is mostly a fact about who is in each group.

Owner households in this region skew older and skew toward people who bought a long time ago. A house bought in 1998 and refinanced during the low-rate years carries a payment that bears no relationship to what the same house costs to buy today. Roughly a third of owner households nationally have no mortgage at all, and their housing cost is tax, insurance and upkeep.

The renter figures, by contrast, reflect what the market charges now, because renters face the current price every year. So the honest reading of the gap is not "owning is cheaper". It is that people who bought years ago are insulated, and everyone facing today's prices is not. A first-time buyer today enters the owner column at today's prices, not at the column's average.

The Number Beside The Number

Before the table, the caveat that governs how you should read it. These are survey estimates, not counts, and in this region the survey runs into small towns very quickly.

Several of the smallest towns here return a renter cost-burden of one hundred percent. That is a real figure computed from a real sample, and it rests on a few dozen renting households or fewer. In a town with thirty renting households, three households moving changes the percentage by ten points. Those towns are in the table with their household counts sitting right beside their percentages, and every ranked claim in this article is drawn from towns with at least 200 households in the relevant group.

Applying that floor, the highest renter burden in the region is in Sunderland, where 72.1% of 971 renting households are cost-burdened. For owners it is Becket, at 40.2%.

Severe Burden Is The Number That Actually Bites

Thirty percent is a threshold. Fifty percent is a different kind of situation, and the survey tracks it separately. Region-wide, roughly 28,958 renting households spend half or more of their gross income on rent and utilities.

At that level, the ordinary shocks of life stop being absorbable. A car repair, a reduced shift, a rent increase of fifty dollars. This is the population that moves involuntarily, and it is a large part of why the rental market in the valley cities turns over as fast as it does.

It also explains something that confuses people looking at this region from outside. Housing here is inexpensive by Massachusetts standards and a great many households are still stretched, because incomes are lower too. Cheap housing and housing people cannot carry are not opposites. They are the normal condition of a region whose prices fell with its industry and whose wages fell further.

Every Town, Owners And Renters Side By Side

Sortable and filterable. Renting households make up about 33% of all households in the region, so in most towns the renter column describes a minority, and in the hill towns a very small one. Read the household count before you read the percentage next to it.

What To Take From It

If you are renting here and weighing whether to buy, the useful comparison is not this table. It is your current rent against the full carrying cost of a specific house, and the part people leave out is the tax line, which in this region varies more between neighbouring towns than almost anywhere else in the country. Our town-by-town breakdown of the rates and the bills they produce is the place to start, and the calculator runs it for any price in any town.

If you are renting and staying, what the federal government thinks rent should cost in your town is worth reading, particularly if you receive or are applying for a housing voucher, because that figure is what sets the ceiling.

And if you are looking at a town in this table and wondering why its renter numbers look so stark, check the household count first. In this region, more often than not, the answer is that there are barely any renters in that town at all.