Rent burden
Could the typical household here afford the going rent? This map shows the Columbus-area HUD Fair Market Rent as a share of each neighborhood’s median household income. Search your address or click any neighborhood, and switch bedroom size — above 30% is the classic “rent-burdened” line.
How to read this map
Fair Market Rent (FMR) is HUD’s estimate of a modest local rent, set once a year for the whole Columbus metro — so it’s the same dollar figure everywhere on this map. We annualize it and divide by each neighborhood’s median household income (from the Census ACS), area-weighted across the tracts a neighborhood covers. Because the rent is constant, the map’s pattern is really an affordability-of-income map: a warmer color means the same rent takes a bigger bite of local paychecks.
Above 30% is the long-standing “rent-burdened” threshold. Switch bedroom size with the tabs; the drawer shows the neighborhood’s median household income and its median gross rent — what renters here actually pay, which (unlike FMR) does vary place to place.
Source: HUD Fair Market Rents (Columbus, OH HUD Metro FMR Area) and U.S. Census ACS 5-year median household income + gross rent by tract, intersected with Census TIGER/Line tract boundaries. See methodology for details.