In the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area in 1995, the most recent year for which data are available from the American Housing Survey, 103,700 households had "worst case" needs for rental housing assistance. These estimates do not include the homeless.

Households are considered to have worst case needs for housing assistance when they:

• are renters with incomes below 50 percent of area median income (which, in Miami, was $22,300 for a four-person household in 1998);
• either pay over half their income for rent or live in severely inadequate housing; and
• are not assisted by Federal, state, or local housing assistance programs.

In the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area:

• those with worst-case needs are 22 percent of renters and 8 percent of all households. Some 60 percent of the eligible unassisted very-low-income renters have worst case needs. In 1997, 52 percent of eligible renters in the U.S., and 46 percent of eligible renters in the South, had worst case needs.
• 38,300 of the 103,700 households with worst case needs are families with children, and at least 30,100 other households have elderly or disabled members.
• 73 percent of the worst case heads of households that are not elderly or disabled are working.
• 70 percent of the worst case households are minorities.
• 103,400 are paying over half their income for rent, while 2,200 live in severely inadequate housing.
• fully 82 percent of those with worst case needs live in adequate, uncrowded housing, with severe rent burden as their only housing problem.
• most - 66 percent - of those with worst case needs have incomes below 30 percent of area median income, which in 1998 was $13,400 per year for a four-person household.
• severe shortages of affordable housing for renters with incomes below 30 percent of median. In 1995, for every 100 renter households with these "extremely low" incomes, there were only 49 units they could afford. And since many of these units were occupied by higher-income renters, only 36 units were both affordable and available for every 100 extremely-low-income renters.

HUD analysis of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale housing market shows that between 1998 and 1990, the year of the previous AHS survey:

• the number of households with worst case needs rose by 13 percent.
• the number of renters with incomes below 30 percent of area median declined by 3 percent, while the number of units affordable to them rose by 15 percent.
• the severe shortage of housing affordable to extremely-low-income renters eased slightly but insignificantly, rising from 41 to 49 units for every 100 renters.