Yeah lol, if you know one dude who is paying $200 for rent, in the US, he almost certainly has to not be legally on the lease, or at best, in some kind of run down old 5 bedroom house or something...

And he'd almost certainly also be in a very low CoL state or city.

Like uh, from what I can find, but also cannot source with total confidence...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-rent-by-state

The cheapest studio apts in the country are around $650 a month, in like... Nebraska, slightly less in South Dakota.

The average cost rental price is $1325, but thats average for all areas, all kinds of apartments... my guess would be that average studio apt rent over the whole US is... about $950 - $1150?

I dunno, I'd have to pull in all their data sources and do my own calculations.

I cannot vouch for having personally validated the quality of these stats, but uh yeah.

And yeah, it is even more difficult to find actual data like this that also takes into account household size and income, all in one data set, also including and accounting things like all the varying kind of rent subsidies... so that you can actually do the income differentiation thing my original critic threw out as if this was trivial.

Also, its worth noting to my original comment... I did not include rent insurance, water, power, gas, other shit like pet rent, internet, phone, the fact that broke people likely have evictions from being broke and can thus functionally basically never rent again from the vast majority of landlords, they dont have the savings to put down a deposit and first months rent...

... and basically most of the funding that went toward gov and non profit rent assistance programs and pathway out of homelessness programs just got cut by the Trump admin.

Also, also: If data on a topic doesn't exist, then, to privileged, data wonk type people... the problem doesn't exist, is theoretical.

One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, 10 or 50 million for whom we just don't bother to adequately study is a reason for me to be dismissive of the notion that anything could be wronf.