Overcrowding can happen for various reasons, whether it’s single parents with more kids than bedrooms or friends who bunk together because they can’t afford their rent or mortgage. We analyzed the latest housing data to determine just how crowded people are and which states are feeling the squeeze— here's what we found.
- The states with the highest rate of people in homes with more than two per bedroom are California (12.9%), Hawaii (11.5%) and New York (9.7%). This is less frequent in rural states Vermont (2.4%), West Virginia (2.5%), New Hampshire and Maine (both 2.7%).
- 38% of Americans who live in homes have more bedrooms than people. People are most likely to live in homes with more bedrooms than people in Wyoming (47.2%), Delaware (46.9%) and North Dakota (46.4%) and least likely in the District of Columbia (29.3%), Hawaii (29.8%) and California (31.3%).
- There are 93.8 million more bedrooms in the U.S. than people (not living in group housing). This is most common in the most populous states: Florida has 8.8 million more bedrooms, Texas has 6.6 million more and California has 5.2 million more.
- New York state has 2.2 million fewer bedrooms than people - the only state to fall below zero.
You can check out the full report and rankings here: https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/overcrowded-study/
LendingTree's Chief Consumer Finance Analyst, Matt Schulz, had this to say:
"With housing prices and interest rates as high as they are today, buying a house often requires sacrifice. While everyone would love to get a big house with extra bedrooms that they can use for office space, media centers, workout rooms and such, that's just not in the cards for many Americans. Instead, they're trading space for affordability in hopes of reaching their dream of home ownership."
