In the Sacramento metropolitan area in 1996, the only year for which data are available from the American Housing Survey, 32,900 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 Sacramento, was $25,700 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 Sacramento area:

• those with worst-case needs are 15 percent of renters and 6 percent of all households. Some 53 percent of the eligible unassisted very-low-income renters have worst case needs. In 1997, 52 percent of eligible unassisted renters in the U.S., and 52 percent of eligible renters in the West, had worst case needs.
• 16,600 of the 32,900 households with worst case needs are families with children, and at least 8,700 other households have elderly or disabled members.
• 49 percent of the worst case heads of household that are not elderly or disabled are working.
• 46 percent of the worst case households are minorities.
• 31,700 are paying over half their income for rent, while 3,600 live in severely inadequate housing.
• fully 77 percent of those with worst case needs live in adequate, uncrowded housing, with severe rent burden as their only housing problem.
• most - 75 percent - of those with worst case needs have incomes below 30 percent of area median income, which in 1998 was $15,400 per year for a four-person household.

The Sacramento area had very severe shortages of housing affordable to renters with incomes below 30 percent of median. In 1996, for every 100 renter households with these "extremely low" incomes, there were only 56 units they could afford. And since many of these units were occupied by higher-income renters, only 29 units were both affordable and available for every 100 extremely-low-income renters.

Sacramento was first surveyed by the American Housing Survey in 1996.