> In our new data study, we analyzed the anonymized data spanning three years from tens of thousands of verified loan applicants from Priceonomics customer Earnest to see how much people actually pay in rent across America.

The sample may be fairly large but it is almost certainly not representative. These figures only represent the subset of the population who would use an online financial services company AND actually did use it.

I would expect data from sources such as the Census Bureau to be much more representative of reality. Here is one visualization of such data I found [0]. These figures are much, much closer to the actual conditions I have personally observed in multiple states.

My guess is that the reported figures from Earnest miss large categories such as low-income and elderly people. The numbers are way too high for many states.

[0]: http://overflow.solutions/demographic-data/national-data/sta...