Whitney Ergood Obricky knows a thing or two about the rental market in the United States.

I'm a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Ergo to Obricky's whole job is tracking how much it costs people to rent a home.

We're seeing a record high number of cost burden renters.

Cost burden. That's research speak for how much of someone's income goes to their housing costs and in

22 the latest year for which there's data the cost burden on renters was huge.

We're also seeing that now half of all renters are cost-burdened.

That data represents real people, 22.4 million of them, whose housing costs overwhelm their

incomes.

People like Genuine Campbell.

Do you want to pay the bills and then get half the rent

or do you want to try to do the whole rent

and then it be back on bills?

The single mother of four is a lift driver and lives in Philadelphia.

She was living in a two bedroom apartment.

Her rent went up from $1,300 a month to $1,600. Now she's looking for a cheaper apartment for her family, something around

a thousand dollars a month. It's like you're dreaming of a fairy tale, but I'm going to try to find something that I can handle and I can manage.

On the other side of the country in Albuquerque, New Mexico,

Natalie French and her roommate were paying $1,200 for two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Then they found out their rent was going up.

They gave us a notice that the rent was going to be going up by $225 a month.

So it was going to go up to I believe 1350 basically then there were pet fees and so that was totally out of our

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