No Room to Breathe: Inside America's Overcrowded Homes

19 million people live in overcrowded homes which hurts health, education, and opportunity

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Zip code deep dive on overcrowding from the Los Angeles times

America is now experiencing one of the worst rates of overcrowded homes in the nation’s history. 19 million Americans live in overcrowded homes where more than 2 people share 1 bedroom. This also comes at a time when homelessness has hit all-time highs. Housing in America is deeply fractured, leaving people crammed into homes often in unhealthy, unsafe, and illegal conditions.

Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota has the most overcrowded homes in the nation. The average number of people per room in this county is 5.24 people. The average! I’ve written about Oglala Lakota County several times and I visited there last year. It is also the county with the lowest life expectancy in America. My experience there visiting people in their homes showed this level of overcrowding. Although the county is twice as large as Rhode Island, the few houses are cramped with families trying to make ends meet.

Overcrowding hurts the poor the most, negative impacts on childhood health

In one of the most interesting studies on overcrowding in America from a team at UNC and UCLA, the researchers looked at households with multiple siblings to evaluate the impact of overcrowding. As each new child was born and the house stayed the same, the effects of overcrowding could be more easily evaluated. The team found unequivocal results that living in a crowded home can negatively affect academic performance, educational outcomes, behavioral health, and physical health.

“We find significant negative effects of crowding on children’s math and reading scores. A unit increase in crowding significantly reduces children’s math scores by 4.3 standard points and reading scores by 6.8 standard points. These findings control for demographics and socioeconomic status, revealing that the home environment has an independent effect on the academic wellbeing of children throughout the nation…. An additional person per room is expected to increase children’s internal behavior problems, such as withdrawal or depression, by 2.6% and increase external behavior problems, such as a strong temper, by 4.4%.”

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Crowding, commute, cost or care?

Do I live closer to my child’s school? Do I pay more to be closer to work? Do I pay less rent but have a longer commute? Is the money that I save from living with others worth the crowded home? Perhaps I can room with others and split the costs, but have less space for my family to live in? These are the tradeoffs that people are forced to make in America. When housing prices rise, low-income families are the first ones to adjust their spending preferences. These are the times when overcrowding tends to rise the most.

Overcrowding was a fatal issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. NIH researchers found that, “For every standard deviation increase in the rate of overcrowding in a county, the expected COVID-19 mortality is 14.8% higher.” The relationship between COVID-19 mortality and overcrowding was far stronger than it was with poverty. This was particularly challenging because the global healthcare challenges also brought on a financial crisis, which further pushed more people into homes. The last time the US had seen rates of overcrowding increase by that much were during the 2008 financial crisis.

The pandemic did decrease overcrowding rates as health concerns mounted. Prior to the pandemic, 6.2% of Americans nationwide were living in overcrowded homes. As people became more worried about close quarters they moved out of crowded areas, but the financial hardship that persisted has caused many to return to those same overcrowded conditions.

Overcrowding has created negative educational outcomes for children. Researchers gathered materials from eight states, including California, Texas, and New York, as well as Washington DC from 2010 to 2017 and found that children being deemed “not ready” for school was strongly correlated to whether that child was living in an overcrowded household.

In one report from the The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), the team found that, “it appears that in places like the Bay Area with high demand and housing shortages, the fallout is a combination of overcrowding, increased commute times, increased rent burden, homelessness, and people leaving or not arriving at all,” said Sarah Karlinsky, the research director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at Berkeley.

But Ezra Klein told us to build more homes

The issue of overcrowding in America isn’t just about not having a large enough supply of housing, it is also about a mismatch of the housing stock that currently exists.

Baby boomer empty nesters own twice as many of the country's three-bedroom-or-larger homes, compared with millennials with kids, according to a recent analysis from Redfin. Housing advocates have argued that there should be incentives to try to put these homes on the market to help open up unused space, particularly as it has become increasingly difficult to increase the overall supply of new housing stock. 125 million people live in houses where there are more bedrooms than people in the home. This is most common in some of the country’s most populous states: Florida has 8.8 million more bedrooms than people, Texas has 6.6 million more.

The share of overcrowded homes had remained relatively flat through the 1980s and 1990s, but starting in the 2000s as cities became more crowded, the supply of new housing began to slow, the gap between the rich and the poor got wider, and the population continued to rise, which meant the rates of overcrowding crept upwards. Now, 6% of the housed population lives in overcrowded homes. But as always, the national numbers mask what is happening in different communities.

The states with the highest rate of people in homes with more than two per bedroom are California with 5 million people (12.9% of its population), Hawaii with 160,000 people (11.5% of its population) and New York with 1.9 million people (9.7% of its population).

Wheeler County, Georgia was the next most overcrowded county in the nation (after Oglala Lakota, SD), with 4.84 people on average sharing one room. This small county of 8,000 people that is 65% white and 100 miles directly west from Savannah has seen its population increase more than 25% in the last two decades. One of the biggest reasons is because Wheeler is home to Georgia’s largest prison. When Wheeler Correctional Facility opened in 1998, it brought in hundreds of jobs and thousands of inmates. Unfortunately, the housing supply never grew in turn. The Economic Innovation Group (EIG) ranked Wheeler 3,131st out of 3,135 counties for economic distress and the worst in the state of Georgia. 59% of the adults there are not working and 14% of the businesses have closed over the last 5 years, triple the national average.

Overcrowding is also a helpful way to understand why America's homelessness numbers don’t capture the full picture. As I’ve written about several times, the point-in-time count of homelessness in America fails to properly count the extent of America’s challenges. Mississippi shows this in the extreme: it has the nation’s lowest per-capita rate of sheltered and unsheltered homelessness, 4 people for every 10,000, but it’s third highest for doubled-up households per capita — nearly 200 people for every 10,000. Double-up households are those that are living with others because of economic hardship or housing loss.

The Path Forward

As I was researching this piece, I came across many right-wing publications that blame the rise in immigration for overcrowding in America. While an increase in population can cause overcrowding, the much more dominating force is the lack of housing supply. The way we know this is because the US has gone through many periods of rising immigration, but that was also coupled with an increase in housing. The overcrowding numbers during this period do not show meaningful constraints. In addition, when we look at the counties with the highest rates of overcrowding, they are not the ones with the highest shares of immigrants. Counties in Utah, Idaho, Alabama, have some of the highest rates of overcrowding but these communities are not high destination spots for immigrants. This is why all of our solutions rely on increasing the supply of housing in various ways.

🏡 1. Tax Credits To Downsize Empty Nesters

There’s a horrific mismatch between the number of bedrooms and their occupants in America. It’s a problem that AirBnB and Uber tried to address in their business models — a massive unused inventory at all times. If states with severe overcrowding implement local tax incentives, such as downsizing credits or relocation subsidies for older homeowners (especially baby boomers) to move into smaller housing units, these programs would free up larger homes for growing families in need of more space. This type of action is well proven to be effective in improving overcrowding. The UK’s “Help to Move” scheme offers cash grants to older adults who downsize, freeing up larger family homes. A 2018 analysis by the Centre for Ageing Better showed that such programs help reduce housing inequality and improve quality of life for both older and younger generations. In Australia, a Downsizer Super Contribution Scheme allows seniors to sell their homes and contribute up to AUD $300,000 of proceeds tax-free to their retirement accounts. This increased mobility for older homeowners and opened up housing for younger families.If even 10% of over-housed older Americans relocated, it could shift millions of bedrooms back into circulation and ease overcrowding in high-pressure housing markets.

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🎪 2. Legalize Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) in High-Demand States

Cities with the worst overcrowding (e.g., California, Hawaii, New York) often have strict zoning laws that limit new construction or multi-unit dwellings in residential areas. Another solution would be to encourage state and municipal governments to legalize and streamline the construction of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)—secondary units like garage apartments or backyard cottages—which can expand affordable housing options without requiring large-scale new developments. In California, where overcrowding affects over 5 million residents, legislation like SB 9 and AB 68 loosened restrictions on ADU construction. Since then, applications for ADUs have surged. A 2023 UCLA study found that in Los Angeles County alone, ADUs added more than 23,000 new units between 2017 and 2022 and dramatically decreased overcrowding, particularly in many areas where adding large apartment complexes would be politically or economically infeasible. A 2020 report from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley showed that ADUs in California cost about half as much to build as traditional single-family homes and are typically rented out at below-market rates. Portland, Oregon, which removed most zoning restrictions on ADUs in 2010, saw a 25% annual increase in ADU construction for five years and noted a shift toward multi-generational and low-income family use.

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🏗️ 3. Public Housing Construction in Economically Distressed Counties

Rural and economically distressed areas like Oglala Lakota, SD and Wheeler, GA where the housing stock is minimal and underdeveloped need a different type of solution than dense areas like Los Angeles, New York City, or San Francisco. The solution instead should come from federal and state governments to develop more public housing or mixed-income developments. Even modular, or prefabricated construction techniques, to cut costs and speed up timelines. A 2023 HUD evaluation found that public housing investments in rural and tribal communities led to a 20–30% reduction in overcrowding rates within five years when paired with supportive services and local employment programs. The Fort Peck Reservation in Montana launched a tribal housing initiative in 2019 using modular homes. Backed by a $2.5 million grant from the Indian Housing Block Grant program, the project housed 40 families in its first phase and helped reduce multigenerational overcrowding in the area by 15% in two years. A 2021 analysis from the Economic Innovation Group highlighted that distressed counties lack the tax base for private development. Direct public investment, modeled on the Opportunity Zone framework, was shown to stimulate modest business activity and reduce housing burdens when paired with community engagement.

Individuals can figure out how they can contribute to any of these 3 path forward solutions (and more) by exploring here.

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