Houston housing report: rising rents, insurance costs squeeze Harris County

More than half of Houston renters are now spending too much of their paychecks just to keep a roof overhead, and the squeeze is showing up in everyday tradeoffs. The Kinder Institute’s latest housing report says 52.6% of renters in Houston and 51.2% across Harris County are cost-burdened, meaning housing eats up more than 30% of income. Rice University researchers said that leaves residents with less money for food and transportation, even as rents keep climbing faster than wages.

The 2026 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston, the seventh edition of the Kinder series, points to a problem that is bigger than construction alone. Michelle Smirnova said, “It’s getting worse.” Steve Sherman said renters and owners are still cost-burdened because wages have stagnated while non-housing costs keep rising. Roughly one-quarter of homeowners are also cost-burdened, underscoring that the pressure now reaches well beyond apartment dwellers and first-time buyers.

Insurance has become one of the biggest reasons the math no longer works. Kinder found homeowner’s insurance climbed more than 10% in a single year, rising faster than home values and adding to the burden on both would-be buyers and current owners. The institute has linked those increases to severe storms, higher property values, and rising construction and repair costs. In a July 2025 analysis, Kinder said Harris County homeowners paid about $3,325 on average in property insurance premiums in 2023, about $1,000 more than in 2015, and that premiums rose another 19% in 2024.

Those costs have widened the gap between what families can afford and what homes actually cost. Kinder’s 2025 report put the median Harris County home price at about $325,000, while a median-income household could afford about $195,000, leaving a roughly $130,000 gap. A September 2024 analysis said that affordability gap had nearly quadrupled in five years. The new report also found eviction filings remained high, with roughly one filing for every ten households countywide in 2024.

The pressure is unevenly shared across Harris County. ABC13 reported that Black homeownership in Houston fell 16% from 2023 to 2024, with the steepest losses east of Interstate 69 and Texas 288. Outside city limits, Black homeownership rose by more than 3,500 households, but the regional gains have not erased the losses inside Houston. The report also comes amid growing investor activity, including an estimated 11,000 Harris County homes owned by nine institutional investors, about 1% of the county’s housing stock, with concentrations in parts of Atascocita, Spring and Bear Creek.

Kinder and Rice paired the report with a housing dashboard developed with Harris County and the city of Houston and updated twice a year. The broader message is blunt: in a county long defined by relative affordability, the biggest barrier is increasingly not just whether homes exist, but whether working families can pay the full cost of living in them.