46% of Georgia pays more than 1/3 of their income for rent, Federal Reserve data shows

ATLANTA — The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta lists a cluster of 22 counties as the metro Atlanta area, when it comes to regional housing.

The latest data available from the system, from March 2023, shows only two counties in that cluster are affordable for housing, specifically homeownership.

The data from the Federal Reserve shows that affordability is from a combination of factors, using median income, median home price, and how much of a resident’s annual wages go to paying for their home.

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While Newton and Paulding counties were reported as “affordable” based on the Home Ownership Affordability Monitor Index, the 20 other counties in the cluster were not.

Affordability by the HOAM Index is set based on a simple scale.

Any county with a score under 100 is deemed unaffordable, while anything 100 or above is considered affordable.

Both Newton and Paulding show scores of 110 or higher.

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The rest average about 87.5, with scores under 90 making up the majority, when it comes to HOAM Index ratings.

One county is even lower with Gwinnett County coming in at 77.1.

Questions of affordability aren’t restricted to home ownership. The Federal Reserve’s Southeastern Rental Affordability Tracker shows that in the city of Atlanta, 46.7% of renter households are cost-burdened, meaning they pay at least 30% of their income on rent.

More than 25% are severely cost-burdened, which means they pay more than 50% every month on rent.

The same rental tracker, slightly zoomed out to focus on the Atlanta region, shows a slightly higher percentage of renter households are cost-burdened. According to the SRAT, 48% of renter households are cost-burdened, while exactly 5% are severely cost-burdened.

On the statewide level, 46.1% of Georgia renters are cost-burdened.

A separate tracker, focused on a five-county spread in metro Atlanta shows an increase in evictions.

The data shows there were 11,258 eviction filings in May across Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties.

Since the start of 2023, there have been 61,438 eviction filings in the same five-county region, though it’s worth noting that the count of eviction filings is preliminary as of August 2022.

There were 140,303 evictions filed in all of 2022, and 53,704 from January to May 2022.

As of June, the median rent for an apartment in the Atlanta area is a reported $1,530, according to ApartmentList.

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