To observe an inflation crisis “on steroids,” look no further than America’s rental housing market, famed sociology professor Matthew Desmond told a panel of senators Tuesday. Rental prices have exceeded income gains by 325% since 1985, with costs growing at their fastest-ever pace last year, Desmond said. And low-income families already living in the cheapest homes available to them — who often spend an unsustainable portion of their paychecks on rent — are left with few options but to cut back on other necessities like food and healthcare.
Meanwhile, some property owners, seeing an opportunity in the scarcity of affordable, available homes, are working to facilitate price hikes to make a profit, “knowing they have a captive tenant base,” Desmond said during a Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs hearing Thursday. “What we can no longer do is — looking renting families in the face, families now living in cars, in garages, in attics, in storage sheds in the richest country on the planet — and tell those families, ‘You know, we’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford it,’” Desmond, the author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” and the director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, said. “Because that is a lie.”Tuesday’s congressional hearing was one of multiple held on soaring …