How Well Are We Housed. 5. Rural: Fid-Bau Portal

How Well Are We Housed. 5. Rural

R. Limmer

This account of the condition of housing in rural America is part of a HUD series on housing conditions and is based on the 1976 Annual Housing Survey and the 1976 Current Population Reports. Rural households are described as those found outside urban areas (on farms), in open country (nonfarms), and in communities of under 2,500 people. About 28 percent of all U.S. households are rural, and the majority are white. Most rural residents do not farm the land but do own their homes, which are usually 1 - family units on less than 10 acres. Although maintenance flaws are most frequent in nationwide housing, plumbing, sewage, and kitchen flaws are considerably higher in rural areas. Rural blacks live in the worst housing, with nearly four times the rate of physical deficiencies as the housing of all Americans. Nearly a third of all rural black housing has plumbing flaws, and about a quarter suffers from sewage and kitchen flaws. Maintenance flaws appear almost four times as often in rural black housing as they do in all rural housing. Overall, inadequacies of rural housing are due to lack of access to public water and sewer systems, income (particularly among blacks whose median income is half that of all rural households), and age of farm housing (over half was built before World War II). The amount of acreage has the most effect on the probability of living in inadequate rural housing, although income and demographic characteristics also have an impact on the probability of flawed housing. In addition, when seeking standard housing on the open market, rural households more frequently must spend a larger proportion of their incomes for it than the general population. Photographs and tabular and statistical data are included.