Study Finds Economic Disparities Between Remote and Onsite Workers in D-FW, Nationally

It’s conventional wisdom — especially from those who deal in rent and mortgage qualifications — that a household should not spend more than 30 percent of its gross household income on housing costs.

Households that spent more than 30 percent are categorized into what’s known as cost-burdened. As of 2019, nearly one in three U.S. households spent above the cost-burdened threshold.

More recently, pandemic-induced changes to the workforce are shedding light on a previously unexplored divide. Apartment List’s latest report, “The Remote Work Divide in Housing Cost Struggles,” looks at how the remote work revolution draws attention to the economic disparities between remote workers and onsite workers.

The study found that onsite workers — retail salespeople, food-service workers, construction workers, and teachers — are 41 percent more likely to be cost-burdened for housing than those in remote-friendly occupations.

Remote-friendly jobs include software developers, accountants, and office clerks.

Apartment List, a San Francisco-based online marketplace for apartment listings, took a deep dive into the topic on a national scale and broke it down regionally as well. In the Dallas region:

• 17 percent of workers in remote-friendly occupations live in cost-burdened households, compared to 24 percent of those whose jobs must be performed onsite.
• Cost-burden rates are substantially worse for renters compared to homeowners. In the Dallas area, 40 percent of onsite workers are renters, a notably higher rate than that of remote-friendly workers (33 percent). Among renters, the cost burden rate is 37 percent for onsite workers, and 27 percent for remote-friendly workers.
• Even among those with remote-friendly jobs, the data shows significant disparities by race. Among remote-friendly workers in the Dallas area, 29 percent of Black workers and 17 percent of Hispanic workers are cost-burdened, compared to just 14 percent of White workers.

The struggle has not abated as higher housing rises have risen during the pandemic.

In 2020, the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies released an analysis that determined nearly half of Texas households were regarded as moderately (30 percent to 50 percent) or severely (more than 50 percent) cost-burdened by 2019.

“Texas is very unaffordable for the lowest-income households,” Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, told the Texas Tribune in 2020.

“This is true everywhere across the country, but when we look across the states, Texas does have one of the highest-burden rates for low-income renters who are making less than $15,000.”

If you want to jump down a rabbit hole and compare the Dallas-Fort Worth area with other metro areas, check out Apartment List’s exhaustive study. You can find it here.