How do you make the numbers work when they don’t? An old housing rule of thumb says spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, which includes both rent and utilities. People who pay more are said to be cost-burdened.

If a person doesn’t earn well more than the median income, 30% is not feasible, says Jennifer Prusak, director of the Housing Law Clinic at Vanderbilt University Law School, where she is associate clinical professor of law. The federal government created the “30% rule” 80 or 90 years ago, she says. “In large sections of the country that’s just out of reach.”

Last year, Nashville Mayor John Cooper convened an Affordable Housing Task Force, which issued a report with recommendations in June 2021. The task force found even using data from before the COVID-19 pandemic, 44% of rental households in Nashville – roughly 65,000 – were cost-burdened.

As the report says, every dollar spent on housing is a dollar that can’t be spent on other needs, such as food, clothing, child care, education and setting aside money for an emergency. It’s tough even for those making the area median income or AMI, which for a family of four in the Nashville-Murfreesboro-Franklin area comes to $96,700.

At that income, a family wanting to pay up to 30% of gross income on rent and utilities should try to stay under $2,417 each month. That’s just over $29,000 each year for housing, with some going for rent and some for utilities. Some landlords also require renters’ insurance, which could be added in as a cost of housing.

How much housing a family of four needs or wants depends on the family. Some might find a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment workable, while others – maybe an adult couple with a teenage daughter and son – might want more space.

A recent search for three-bedroom, two-bath rentals in Nashville on Zillow yielded 54 results at the end of last month. Three rented for $4,000 a month or more, eight were between $3,000 and $3,999; 27 rented between $2,000 and $2,999 and 17 rented for less than $2,000 per month, including some that were restricted to lower-income families.

Turning to rentals with two bedrooms and one bath, 280 were listed on Zillow early this month, with some having more than one bath. Rents ranged from $1,025 to $8,500.

Some people deal with rising rents by moving farther and farther away from Nashville. Others double up with friends and relatives, look for roommates or live in week-to-week, extended-stay motels and hotels.

Zac Oswald, lead attorney with the housing practice group at Legal Aid Society of Nashville, says apartment development is booming in Hendersonville, Gallatin and Clarksville.

“It’s not rare for us to have people working in Nashville commuting from Clarksville,” he says. Legal Aid represents low-income clients in civil cases; their incomes must fall within a certain range for them to be represented.

“$900 to $1,100 is not an outrageous number” for a Legal Aid client to be paying in rent each month, Oswald says, and even rents in rural counties can reach $1,000 a month. Families of four or more are living in two- or three-bedroom apartments; plenty of clients work multiple jobs so they can pay for a place to live, he says, and elderly people are going back into the workforce to make ends meet.

People might be able to rent a place for $800 a month in an outlying county, he adds, but they’ll have to spend more on gasoline if they have to drive back to Nashville to work. And rents may rise in those areas, too.

“A lot of (clients) quite frankly are living in substandard housing. That’s not necessarily in their best interest,” he says, because the properties can come with mold and pests that can cause health problems. “Instead of spending money on housing they’re spending money on medical bills.” Some choose to stay in less-than-ideal places because it seems like a better option than trying to find another place to live.

A rise in the cost of housing is not a new problem, Oswald says. Nowadays, he says, “it feels like the needs are more imminent and that the potential consequences are more dire. It’s magnifying the complications for our clients” because there often isn’t the next place where they can rebuild their lives.