Over the past five years, housing has been on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and foremost in the minds of policymakers. Yet the dialogue has focused primarily on foreclosures and largely overlooked a significant aspect of the crisis that lurks in plain sight: affordable rental housing.

The statistics are stark and clearly demonstrate that high rent burdens are a broad-based problem. A recent nationwide study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that nearly half of all renters were paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2009, and rent burdens increased by 17 percent between 1990 and 2009. The share of renters paying half of their income for rent increased by nearly 38 percent between 1990 and 2009.