Rental Market in a vicious cycle
Star Tribune
By Don Jacobson
...When the "foreclosure crisis" is mentioned, thoughts immediately turn to single-family homeowners, perhaps those who took out exotic adjustable-rate mortgages or bought too much house for their means and now find themselves in danger of losing their dwellings to their lenders.
But it isn't only single-family homes that have been affected by foreclosures -- so have multifamily apartment buildings and rental homes. Happening mostly under the radar, some overextended Twin Cities landlords have been defaulting on their mortgages, resulting in blameless tenants being made homeless and forcing them to "double up" with friends or relatives in other rental units...
...Meanwhile, a study published this month by University of Southern California researcher Gary Painter interpreted data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey as indicating a dramatic almost-fivefold increase in overcrowding in U.S. apartments, defined as having more than one person per room in the household...