REAL ESTATE NEWS...Here's how the US housing market has been impacted by the 2008 crash

Older millennials, minorities, especially Hispanics, men and the wealthy in overheated housing markets were most likely to be displaced from homeowners to renters.

The financial crisis of 2008 created the biggest disruption to the U.S. housing market since the Great Depression. From the top of the housing bubble roughly a decade ago until just recently, there’s been a five percentage-point increase in the number of renters to owners to 43.3% from 38.5%. But who are these renters?

To get a clearer picture of who lost out on the American Dream of homeownership, we used the American Community Survey data from 2006 to 2014 to uncover who saw the biggest shift from being a homeowner to a renter by age, gender, race, and income in the 50 largest U.S. metros. We excluded eight cities due to data quality. Among the hardest hit were:

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Ultimately, housing markets with larger spikes in foreclosures during the crisis were more likely to exhibit larger jumps in renting through that time period, especially in housing markets on the West and East Coasts. In fact, Las Vegas saw the number of renter households jump nine percentage points to 49.4% of all households in the nine years prior to 2015.

A Steady Decline in Homeownership and Increase in RentingWhile America is still far from becoming a nation of renters, the percentage of renters in the 50 largest U.S. metros who rent rose from 36.1%, pre-crisis in 2006, to 41.1%, post-crisis 2014. This is a 5-percentage point jump. Meanwhile, homeownership declined 5 percentage points. More than half of the areas with the greatest shift from owners to renters were on the seaboards.

Not only are the percentage of renters increasing, so are the rents – which have risen faster than incomes. Average rents in the top 50 markets have risen 22.3%, while incomes nationally fell 5.8% in the nine years since 2006. To put this into context, a typical household spent just 29.7% of their income on rent in 2006. Since the economic crisis, this number peaked in 2011 at 31.5%, then fell slightly to 30.7% in 2014.

At the local level, we found that in 40 out of the 50 metros examined, households spent a larger fraction of their income towards paying rent than they did in 2006. At the most extreme, renters in Jacksonville, Fla., spent 32.3% of their income on rent – up 4 percentage points from 2006.

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More Renters Where Foreclosures Struck HardestEach of the 50 largest metros that we examined in this study saw an increase in renters from 2006 to 2014. Many of these markets were hit hardest by foreclosures as homeowners became renters by circumstance. Las Vegas, which was the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, had the biggest jump from 39.5% in 2006 to 49.4% in 2014 – rising 9.9 percentage points. It’s followed by Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., West Palm Beach, Fla., and Tampa, Fla.

On the other hand, housing markets that were largely unaffected by the boom and bust of the recession saw the smallest increase in renters. This includes Buffalo, N.Y., Long Island, N.Y., Hartford, Conn., and Boston.

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