Revealed: 93% of districts in major US cities unaffordable to Black residents

In most metro zip codes, majority of Black local renters don't earn enough to afford median rents, National Equity Atlas found

More than 90% of neighborhoods in America's major cities were unaffordable to the majority of local Black residents at the start of the pandemic, according to a new study on the worsening housing crisis in urban regions across the US.

The National Equity Atlas, a research initiative focused on racial and economic equity, compared rents and wages in the 100 most populous American metropolitan regions in 2019 and examined whether the majority of households of different racial groups made enough income to afford median market rents in their neighborhoods.

Only 7% of zip codes in the top 100 metro areas had rents that were affordable to Black residents of those cities in 2019, while 69% of zip codes were affordable to white households.

Forty-eight metro areas in the list had no zip codes at all that were affordable to Black residents.

Only 16% of zip codes in the list had rents that were affordable to Latinx households.

Twelve metro areas had zero zip codes with affordable rents for Latinx households, including Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami, cities with large Latinx populations.