The State of Housing
in Missouri

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Introduction

Missouri is supposed to be affordable. It is one of the talking points of the place - the cost of living is low, a paycheck goes further here than on either coast, you can still buy a house. For a long time that was the whole story, and for many homeowners it still is.

But the renter's Missouri tells a different story, and the data tells it plainly. A state with some of the lowest Fair Market Rents in the country has nearly half of its renters paying more than they can afford. In the Bootheel, where rents are the lowest in the state, the share of renters who are cost-burdened is the highest. In Kansas City, rents have climbed almost 38 percent in five years while the laws meant to protect tenants remain among the weakest in the nation. In the resort counties along the Lake of the Ozarks, more than half of the housing stock sits empty most of the year - second homes and vacation rentals - while the people who clean them, cook in the restaurants, and run the boat docks cannot find a place to live. In St. Louis, tens of thousands of homes sit empty for the opposite reason: not because they are too desirable, but because they have been abandoned.

This report consolidates federal housing data across 11 Missouri counties and the metros, cities, tourism economies, military communities, and rural regions they anchor. Every statistic is sourced to a specific federal dataset, government report, or verified news article. The point is not to argue that Missouri is as expensive as Colorado or California - it is not. The point is that "affordable" is a comparison, and a comparison does not pay rent. When wages are low and protections are thin, even low rents break households. The data shows where, and how, and for whom.

The data speaks for itself.

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Missouri: The Big Picture

Before the counties, the statewide numbers frame the scale.

Wages vs. Housing Costs

The headline gap: the statewide 2-bedroom housing wage of $21.61 is 44 percent higher than the 2026 minimum wage of $15.00, and 57 percent higher than the $13.75 minimum that was in effect when the 2025 Out of Reach figures were calculated. Even at the new minimum, a full-time minimum-wage worker earns about $31,200 a year - well short of what a modest two-bedroom requires.

Cost-Burdened Renters

The Affordable-Housing Deficit (Extremely Low Income Renters)

The Policy Backdrop: A Raise, a Repeal, and a Thin Safety Net

Three recent statewide developments shape every county that follows.

The minimum-wage raise voters passed. In November 2024, nearly 58 percent of Missouri voters approved Proposition A, raising the minimum wage to $13.75 in 2025 and $15.00 in 2026, and creating a paid-sick-leave mandate. - Ballotpedia

The legislature clawed part of it back. In 2025 the legislature passed House Bill 567, which Governor Mike Kehoe signed on July 10, 2025. It repealed the paid-sick-leave mandate (which had taken effect May 1 and ended August 28, 2025) and eliminated the consumer-price-index adjustments that would have raised the minimum wage after 2026. The $13.75 and $15.00 step increases stayed; the automatic inflation indexing did not. - Ballotpedia News (July 11, 2025), Fox4KC

The tenant safety net is thin. "The reality is that tenants in Missouri are some of the least protected tenants in the country," said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of the Kansas City tenant-organizing group KC Tenants. - Nextcity In 2024 the legislature passed a bill prohibiting municipalities from enacting eviction moratoriums unless authorized by state law. - St. Louis Public Radio

The state tried to criminalize sleeping outside - then the courts struck it down. In 2022 Governor Mike Parson signed House Bill 1606, which banned unauthorized sleeping or camping on state-owned land, made a second offense a Class C misdemeanor (up to a $750 fine and 15 days in jail), and threatened localities with loss of state funding if their per-capita homelessness rate exceeded the state average. In December 2023 the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the entire bill 6-0, finding it violated the single-subject rule of the state constitution. - KCTV5, KSMU

For context on the population that policy was aimed at: Missouri's 2023 Point-in-Time count found roughly 6,918 people experiencing homelessness statewide against only 4,068 emergency shelter beds, with homelessness up 12 percent and unsheltered homelessness up 24 percent from 2022. - National Alliance to End Homelessness - Missouri 2023 PIT fact sheet (PDF)

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The Two Metros

Two metropolitan areas hold more than a third of Missouri's people, and they are pulling in opposite directions. Kansas City's housing problem is a problem of pressure - rents rising faster than anywhere else in the state, against the weakest tenant protections. St. Louis's housing problem is a problem of abandonment - tens of thousands of empty buildings, a shrinking population, and an eviction system that keeps grinding even as the city hollows out. The same federal data column - "vacant housing units" - means something completely different in each city.

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Kansas City

County: Jackson County (the Missouri core of the bistate Kansas City metro) County Population: 719,976 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Total Housing Units: 336,288 | Renter-Occupied: 40.9% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,197/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Kansas City has the fastest-rising rents and the most expensive housing of any Missouri metro - and the most organized tenant movement to match.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Kansas City MO-KS HUD Metro FMR Area)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +37.6% ($978 to $1,346) - the highest 2BR FMR in Missouri.

Wages vs. Housing

More than half of Jackson County renters are cost-burdened - the highest share among Missouri's large metros.

Workforce Housing Stories

Kansas City has done what the state has not: build tenant protections. KC Tenants, founded by Tara Raghuveer, drafted a Tenant Bill of Rights the city council passed in 2019, then won a Right to Counsel program that launched June 1, 2022, guaranteeing legal representation to tenants facing eviction regardless of income. - civilrighttocounsel.org, KCUR

The program works where it reaches. According to a 2024 report, in cases that received representation "eviction rates have dropped 21% and 3,117 people have been saved from eviction," and tenant courtroom victories rose from under 2 percent to nearly 45 percent. - civilrighttocounsel.org But it cannot reach everyone: KC Tenants leader Tiana Caldwell testified that she lost an eviction case after being denied counsel "because there weren't enough lawyers to meet the capacity of tenants being evicted." - KCUR In January 2024 the council added a ban on source-of-income discrimination, protecting voucher holders. - Nextcity

vs. Missouri statewide: Jackson County's 2BR FMR ($1,346) runs 20 percent above the statewide 2BR FMR ($1,124), its housing wage ($25.88) is the state's highest, and its renter cost-burden rate (50.7%) exceeds the statewide 45.6%.

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St. Louis

Geography: St. Louis is an independent city (not part of any county) plus surrounding St. Louis County. St. Louis city Population: 288,512 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year St. Louis County Population: 995,569 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year St. Louis city Renter Share: 54.7% of occupied units (a renter-majority city) - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 St. Louis city Median Gross Rent: $997/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

St. Louis is the inverse of Kansas City. Its rents are lower and its growth slower, but it carries a different and heavier burden: a vacancy crisis born of abandonment, not desirability.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, St. Louis MO-IL HUD Metro FMR Area)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +34.3% ($905 to $1,215), with a single +21% jump in FY2024.

Wages vs. Housing

Vacancy of a Different Kind

St. Louis's 16.8 percent vacancy is almost the mirror image of a resort county's. Only half a percent is seasonal or recreational use - this is not second homes. It is abandonment, concentrated by decades of population loss and disinvestment, and concentrated by race: 93 percent of the city's vacant parcels sit in majority-Black neighborhoods.

Workforce Housing Stories

Even as buildings empty out, eviction filings climb. Filings in St. Louis rose nearly 11 percent year over year, with an estimated 6,360 evictions filed in a recent 12-month window per Princeton's Eviction Lab. - St. Louis Public Radio, Eviction Lab St. Louis launched its own Right to Counsel program (effective July 1, 2024), becoming the second Missouri city to do so. - NLIHC But a September review found that of 1,352 people served, only 343 received full eviction defense, the rest getting limited help or referrals - a program advocates say the city underfunded. - St. Louis Public Radio (Nov 18, 2025)

The Land Reutilization Authority is now demolishing and rebuilding: it is on track to demolish 1,000 vacant structures by 2026 using ARPA funds and $15 million in state money, and has begun an infill-housing plan including modular and 3D-printed homes. - Yahoo/STL north side

vs. Missouri statewide: St. Louis city's median gross rent ($997) sits just below the statewide median ($1,033), but its 16.8% vacancy is well above the statewide 11.2% - and almost none of it is the second-home vacancy that drives the figure in tourist counties.

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The Mid-Size Cities

Five mid-size metros - Springfield, Columbia, Jefferson City, Joplin, and Cape Girardeau - form Missouri's affordable middle. Their rents are well below the metros, but the same pattern repeats: cost burden tracks low wages, not high rents. Columbia adds the distortion of a major university; Joplin carries the long tail of the deadliest tornado in modern American history.

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Springfield

County: Greene County County Population: 303,375 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 42.5% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $989/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Springfield, the third-largest city in Missouri and the capital of the Ozarks, has a low vacancy rate (5.8 percent) and rents that have risen a third in five years.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Springfield MO HUD Metro FMR Area)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +33.8% ($746 to $998).

Key Data

Workforce Housing Stories

Springfield is also where Missouri's housing-and-trust problem surfaces most visibly. In August 2024 local reporting documented a wave of social-media rental scams hitting Springfield tenants. The Better Business Bureau's Pamela Hernandez described the mechanics: scammers "give somebody a great deal on rent in a tight market," then push payment through peer-to-peer apps "where you don't have the same type of protections." - OzarksFirst/KOLR Springfield was also the front line of the fight over HB 1606: the Gathering Tree, a Springfield nonprofit running tiny-home communities for unsheltered people, brought the lawsuit that ultimately overturned the state's camping ban. - Springfield Daily Citizen

vs. Missouri statewide: Springfield's rents sit well below the statewide median, yet its cost-burden rate (46.2%) slightly exceeds the statewide 45.6% - the affordability discount disappears against local wages.

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Columbia

County: Boone County (home of the University of Missouri) County Population: 188,043 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 42.3% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,088/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Columbia is a college town, and the data carries the college-town signature: a high renter share, the highest median rent among the mid-size cities, and a cost-burden rate inflated by a large student population living on little or no earned income.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Columbia MO HUD Metro FMR Area)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +12.6% ($894 to $1,007) - the slowest growth of any Missouri area studied, partly because Columbia started higher.

Key Data

Nearly half of Columbia's renters are cost-burdened, a number heavily shaped by students. This is the portability problem Rookd is built for: students arrive with no local rental history, cycle through leases on a one-year clock, and leave with nothing to carry forward.

vs. Missouri statewide: Columbia carries the highest mid-size-city rent ($1,088 median) and a cost-burden rate (49.1%) above the statewide 45.6%, even as its FMR growth lagged the state.

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Jefferson City

County: Cole County (Missouri's capital) County Population: 77,032 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 32.1% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $834/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Jefferson City is Missouri's most affordable metro for renters - the in-state benchmark. A stable, government-anchored economy keeps both rents and cost burden the lowest among the metros studied.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Jefferson City MO HUD Metro FMR Area)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +33.0% ($670 to $891).

Key Data

Even in Missouri's most affordable metro, more than one in three renters is cost-burdened, and the $17.13 housing wage still sits 14 percent above the $15.00 minimum.

vs. Missouri statewide: Jefferson City is the floor - the lowest housing wage ($17.13) and lowest cost-burden rate (34.5%) of any metro in this report. When even the capital cannot get a third of its renters under the 30 percent threshold, "affordable Missouri" needs an asterisk.

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Joplin

County: Jasper County County Population: 124,357 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 37.2% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $973/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Joplin's housing story cannot be told without May 22, 2011, when an EF-5 tornado - the deadliest single tornado in modern U.S. records - killed 161 people, damaged or destroyed more than 7,000 residential buildings, and displaced nearly 10,000 people. - Guidehouse case study, Joplin Area Habitat for Humanity The recovery rebuilt the housing stock from a near-standing start, and the FMR trajectory shows it: Joplin posted the steepest five-year rent growth in the state.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Joplin MO MSA)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +43.3% ($723 to $1,036) - the largest five-year increase of any Missouri area in this report.

Key Data

Workforce Housing Stories

Joplin's rebuild leaned on federal and nonprofit capital: a $158 million HUD Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery award, plus a state CDBG that funded a 35-house "Governor's Challenge" build with University of Missouri, NASCAR, and pro-sports volunteers. - Guidehouse The first tax-credit housing development built after the tornado eventually delivered 144 units, every one with a storm shelter. - KSHB Rebuild Joplin alone completed 180 homes for owners and renters. - Joplin Area Habitat for Humanity

vs. Missouri statewide: Joplin shows what happens when supply is annihilated and slowly rebuilt: the fastest rent growth in the state (+43.3%) and a cost-burden rate (49.5%) well above the statewide 45.6%.

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Cape Girardeau

County: Cape Girardeau County (southeast Missouri, on the Mississippi) County Population: 82,735 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 33.2% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $881/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Cape Girardeau, home to Southeast Missouri State University and the regional hub for the state's southeast corner, posted the most moderate rent growth of the mid-size cities.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Cape Girardeau MO-IL MSA)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +27.4% ($773 to $985).

Key Data

vs. Missouri statewide: Cape Girardeau tracks the statewide pattern almost exactly - a moderate rent, moderate growth, and a cost-burden rate (45.5%) within a tenth of a point of the statewide 45.6%. It is the most "average" county in this report.

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The Tourism Economy

Two Ozark counties run on tourism, and tourism does something specific to housing: it converts year-round homes into second homes and short-term rentals, and it staffs the resorts with seasonal workers who have nowhere to live. The federal data makes the capture visible. In Camden County, more than half of all housing units are held for "seasonal, recreational, or occasional use." In Taney County (Branson), nearly one in five. These are the highest second-home shares in Missouri, and they sit beside the lowest renter shares.

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Branson

County: Taney County County Population: 56,529 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 33.0% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $926/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Branson draws roughly 10 million visitors a year to its theaters, theme parks, and the lakes around it. - KSMU The economy that visitors fuel cannot house the workers who run it.

Vacancy and Second Homes

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Taney County)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +37.4% ($716 to $984), tracking the Kansas City metro despite a fraction of the population.

Key Data and Workforce Stories

The workforce gap is so acute that Branson's biggest employers build their own housing and import their own labor. The Branson Chamber's 2024 commercial real estate forecast reports that the City of Branson, Silver Dollar City, and Big Cedar are building "several hundred new apartment and dormitory units" to house the seasonal and year-round workforce against a persistent inventory shortage. - Branson Chamber 2024 Real Estate Forecast Silver Dollar City fills its summer peak through the J-1 visa program: "we actually recruit from Thailand, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic," said HR vice president Deanna Partridge. - OzarksFirst In October 2024 Silver Dollar City announced a $500 million resort development for the area - its largest investment ever - which local analysts note will intensify already-acute workforce-housing and transit needs. - KSMU, Springfield Business Journal

vs. Missouri statewide: Branson's 18.7 percent seasonal-use share dwarfs the statewide 2.9 percent. The rents grew like a big metro's (+37.4%) while the housing stock quietly converted to vacation use.

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Lake of the Ozarks

County: Camden County (the core of the Lake of the Ozarks resort region) County Population: 43,667 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 17.5% of occupied units - the lowest in this report - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $876/month - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Camden County is the clearest example in Missouri of housing that exists but does not serve the people who work there. The Lake of the Ozarks has a 1,150-mile shoreline and draws millions of visitors; its largest state park alone logged 1.47 million visits in 2023. - Wikipedia: Lake of the Ozarks State Park

The Vacancy Paradox

More than half of every home in Camden County sits empty for most of the year - and almost all of that vacancy is vacation use, not abandonment. This is the Colorado mountain-town pattern transplanted to a Missouri reservoir.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Camden County)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +27.8% ($687 to $878). HUD's 40th-percentile FMR understates the real market: local listings average about $1,900/month, nearly 43 percent above the Missouri average. - krcgtv

Key Data and Workforce Stories

The mismatch is stark: at an average local salary near $40,000 and average rents near $1,900, housing can consume nearly two-thirds of a worker's pay. "It's just a problem everywhere. Rents have shot up so high, and people just can't afford it," said Mark Smetana of Lake Area Helping Hands. - krcgtv Short-term rentals - regulated city by city, with no statewide framework - compete directly for the limited long-term stock. - Lodge Compliance: Camden County Local officials are turning to Opportunity Zone incentives in Sunrise Beach and small cottage developments to claw back workforce supply. - lakeexpo

vs. Missouri statewide: Camden County inverts the state. Where Missouri is 31.9 percent renter and 2.9 percent seasonal-use, Camden is 17.5 percent renter and 52.3 percent seasonal-use. The homes are there; they are just not for the people who work the lake.

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The Base and the Bootheel

Two final counties bracket the extremes of Missouri's renter experience. Fort Leonard Wood shows what a guaranteed housing allowance does to a rural rental market. The Bootheel shows what happens with no such floor at all - the lowest rents in the state producing the highest cost burden.

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Fort Leonard Wood

County: Pulaski County (built around the U.S. Army installation) County Population: 53,894 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 38.8% of occupied units - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,112/month - the highest of any rural Missouri county in this report - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

Pulaski County is a natural experiment in what a housing allowance does. The Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) gives service members a guaranteed, rank-based amount for off-post rent, and the local market rises to meet it - which is why a rural county posts a median rent above $1,100, higher than Springfield, Cape Girardeau, or the Bootheel.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Pulaski County)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +34.9% ($744 to $1,004).

Key Data and Military Housing

The result is the counterintuitive lesson of Pulaski County: it has high rents and low cost burden, because the allowance moves with the rent. Family housing on post is privatized (Fort Leonard Wood Homes operates 1,800-plus homes), and soldiers above certain ranks must live off post, putting BAH dollars directly into the local market. - Army Housing - Fort Leonard Wood, MyBaseGuide BAH functions as a housing voucher with full take-up - a useful model for what guaranteed, rent-indexed assistance can do for affordability, and a reminder that the rest of Missouri's renters have no such floor.

vs. Missouri statewide: Pulaski's median rent ($1,112) sits well above the statewide median ($1,033), yet its cost-burden rate (34.2%) runs more than 11 points below the statewide 45.6 percent - the only county in this report where high rent and low burden coexist.

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The Bootheel

County: Pemiscot County (Missouri's southeast agricultural corner) County Population: 14,958 - ACS 2020-2024 5-year Renter Share: 44.4% of occupied units - the highest in this report - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25003 Median Gross Rent: $695/month - the lowest in this report - ACS 2020-2024 5-year, B25064

The Bootheel is where the "affordable Missouri" story breaks completely. Pemiscot County has the lowest rents in this report and the highest cost burden. Cheap rent is not the same as affordable rent when incomes are lower still.

Fair Market Rent (2BR, Pemiscot County)

• Cumulative FY2020-FY2025: +30.0% ($634 to $824).

Key Data

The numbers tell the whole story in one line: the lowest rent in the report ($695 median) produces the highest cost burden in the report (56.6 percent), because nearly one in three renters spends more than half of everything they earn on housing. The 2BR housing wage ($15.85) is barely above the new $15.00 minimum, but local wages in the agricultural Bootheel rarely reach even that comparison favorably.

vs. Missouri statewide: Pemiscot is the counterexample to the "cheap state" story. It has the lowest rents and the lowest housing wage in the report, and the worst affordability outcome - 56.6 percent cost-burdened against the statewide 45.6 percent, and 32.1 percent severely burdened against 22.2 percent statewide.

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Themes Across the Data

Across 11 counties - two big metros, five mid-size cities, two tourism counties, a military county, and the rural Bootheel - five patterns repeat.

1. One Statistic, Two Crises

Missouri's vacancy data carries two completely different meanings depending on where you read it. In Camden County, 55.3 percent of homes are vacant and 52.3 percent are second homes and vacation rentals - housing that exists but is reserved for people who do not live there. In St. Louis city, 16.8 percent of homes are vacant but only 0.5 percent are seasonal - this is abandonment, 25,000 empty and decaying properties, 93 percent of them in majority-Black neighborhoods. The same census column - vacant housing units - describes a lake full of second homes in one county and a hollowed-out city in another. Any solution that treats "vacancy" as one problem will fix neither.

• Camden County: 55.3% vacant, 52.3% seasonal-use - ACS 2020-2024, B25002/B25004
• Taney County (Branson): 24.5% vacant, 18.7% seasonal-use - ACS 2020-2024
• St. Louis city: 16.8% vacant, 0.5% seasonal; ~25,000 abandoned properties - ACS 2020-2024, LRA

2. The Raise Voters Passed, and the Legislature Clawed Back

Missourians voted in 2024 to raise the floor - 58 percent approved a $15 minimum wage and paid sick leave. In 2025 the legislature repealed the sick-leave mandate and killed the inflation adjustments that would have kept the wage rising after 2026. Meanwhile the 2-bedroom housing wage in every county studied sits above the $15.00 minimum - from $15.85 in the Bootheel to $25.88 in Kansas City. The wage went up once; the rent goes up every year. This is Missouri's version of the national costs-up-wages-flat pattern, with a specific local twist: even the wage increase voters demanded was partly undone before it could compound.

• Statewide 2BR housing wage $21.61 vs. $15.00 minimum - a 44% gap - NLIHC
• Prop A passed (58%), HB 567 repealed sick leave + CPI indexing - Ballotpedia News

3. Affordable on Paper, Burdened in Practice

Missouri has some of the lowest rents in the country, and it does not help its renters as much as the sticker price suggests. Statewide, 45.6 percent of renters are cost-burdened. In the Bootheel, where rents are the lowest in the state, cost burden is the highest (56.6 percent). In Joplin, Columbia, Kansas City, and Cape Girardeau, between 45 and 51 percent of renters are over the line. The only county that gets meaningfully below the statewide rate is Pulaski - because BAH guarantees the rent gets paid. Low rent plus low wages still equals an unaffordable home.

• Pemiscot: lowest rent ($695 median), highest cost burden (56.6%) - ACS 2020-2024
• Statewide 45.6% cost-burdened; 37 affordable-and-available homes per 100 ELI renters - ACS 2020-2024, NLIHC The Gap

4. Tourism's Two-Tier Housing

In Branson and at the Lake of the Ozarks, the tourism economy builds one kind of housing for visitors and another - barely - for workers. Branson's largest employers build dormitories and recruit J-1 visa workers from overseas because the local market cannot house a seasonal workforce; Silver Dollar City's $500 million expansion will deepen the need. At the Lake, more than half the housing stock is vacation use and short-term rentals compete for what remains, while local salaries near $40,000 face rents near $1,900. The homes exist. They are pointed at tourists.

• Branson: employers building "several hundred" dorm/apartment units; J-1 recruiting - Branson Chamber, OzarksFirst
• Lake of the Ozarks: ~$1,900 average rent vs ~$40,000 salary - krcgtv

5. The Least-Protected Tenants, and the Trust Gap That Follows

Missouri tenants are "some of the least protected in the country," in the words of the organizer who built Kansas City's response. The state banned local eviction moratoriums in 2024; Kansas City and St. Louis had to pass their own Right to Counsel programs, and both are underfunded - St. Louis gave full eviction defense to only 343 of 1,352 people it served. Into that gap walk the scammers: the Springfield BBB documented a wave of social-media rental fraud preying on tenants in a tight market, pushing payment through apps "where you don't have the same type of protections." When the legal floor is thin and the listings are unverified, every renter carries the risk alone. This is the trust deficit, and it is exactly the layer Rookd is built to supply.

• Missouri among least tenant-protected; eviction moratoriums banned (2024) - Nextcity, STLPR
• St. Louis evictions +11% (~6,360/yr); RTC reached full defense for 343 of 1,352 - STLPR, STLPR (Nov 2025)
• Springfield social-media rental scams (BBB, Aug 2024) - OzarksFirst

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Why This Matters

The data across these 11 counties paints a clear picture, and it is not the picture the "affordable Missouri" slogan implies. Missouri's housing crisis is real, it is statewide, and it wears different faces in different places: rising rents and weak protections in Kansas City, abandonment and eviction in St. Louis, second-home capture at the Lake and in Branson, deep cost burden on cheap rents in the Bootheel, and a guaranteed-allowance bubble around Fort Leonard Wood.

The numbers point to several conclusions:

Low rent is not the same as affordable rent. Statewide, 45.6 percent of renters are cost-burdened. The county with the lowest rents has the highest burden. The affordability advantage Missouri markets to employers and movers does not reach the renter whose wages are lower still. The two-bedroom housing wage exceeds the minimum wage in every county studied.

The supply problem has two opposite shapes. In the tourism counties, homes exist but are reserved for visitors - more than half the stock at the Lake. In St. Louis, homes exist but have been abandoned - 25,000 of them. Neither is a simple "build more" problem. Both are problems of connecting existing housing to the people who need it.

Trust is the missing infrastructure. Missouri gives renters one of the thinnest legal safety nets in the country. When protections are weak, the burden of verification falls on the renter: is this listing real, is this landlord legitimate, will this deposit ever come back. The Springfield scam wave and the underfunded Right to Counsel programs are two sides of the same gap. In a market where the law will not catch you, trust has to be built into the tools people use to find a home.

That is why Rookd exists. Not as a substitute for the policy, the funding, and the construction Missouri needs - those are necessary. But as a trust layer for the housing that already exists: a way to verify that the listing is real, the landlord is legitimate, and the person you are about to share a home or a deposit with is who they say they are.

A few concrete applications the data points to:

• In St. Louis, where 25,000 properties sit empty and the Land Reutilization Authority is rebuilding block by block: verified landlord and listing profiles to bring returning units back to the market without exposing renters to fraud.
• In Kansas City, where rents are rising fastest and tenants fight for representation: portable, verified rental history so a tenant who wins in housing court is not starting from zero at the next lease.
• In Columbia, where students churn through one-year leases: rental history that follows a graduate to their first real job instead of evaporating at the property line.
• At the Lake of the Ozarks and in Branson, where seasonal workers compete for a sliver of year-round stock: faster verified placement so a returning summer worker is not re-proving themselves to a stranger every May.
• Around Fort Leonard Wood, where service members move on permanent-change-of-station orders: BAH-eligible verified housing that transfers with the soldier.
• In the Bootheel, where the lowest rents still break the most households: verified-tenant access that does not gate a working family behind a credit score they were never given the chance to build.

Because in a state this thinly protected, trust is not optional. It is the infrastructure.

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Methodology and Notes

Data Sources

This report draws on four primary categories of data:

1. Federal housing data (HUD Fair Market Rents): 2-bedroom FMRs by fiscal year via RentData.org Missouri state pages (FY2020 through FY2025) and the master HUD FMR dataset. Each multi-year table row links to the RentData.org Missouri page for that fiscal year.
2. National Low Income Housing Coalition: the 2-bedroom housing wage, hours-per-week calculations, and statewide rent/income figures from NLIHC Out of Reach 2025 - Missouri; the extremely-low-income affordable-housing deficit from NLIHC The Gap - Missouri.
3. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-Year Estimates: population (B01003), total housing units (B25001), occupancy and vacancy (B25002), seasonal/recreational/occasional-use units (B25004), tenure (B25003), median gross rent (B25064), and gross-rent-as-a-percentage-of-income / cost burden (B25070), accessed via Census Reporter county profiles.
4. State agencies and local reporting: the Missouri Housing Development Commission, St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority, Princeton Eviction Lab, and local newsrooms - St. Louis Public Radio, KCUR, KSMU and OzarksFirst (Springfield), Springfield Daily Citizen, the Springfield Business Journal, KSHB and the Joplin Area Habitat for Humanity, krcgtv and LakeExpo (Lake of the Ozarks), and the Branson Chamber.

Important Note on Data Provenance (read before citing)

Honest provenance beats false precision. This is a DRAFT pending the mandatory 3-agent federal-data verification panel (HUD FMR, NLIHC, Census ACS) described in Rookd's research process. The following caveats apply:

• Census ACS figures use the 2020-2024 5-year release, which is the current ACS 5-year vintage as of June 2026 (it superseded the 2019-2023 release in December 2025). Every Census figure in this report is labeled "ACS 2020-2024 5-year" with its table ID. They are NOT mislabeled as 2019-2023 or as Decennial Census. If the verification panel standardizes on the 2019-2023 vintage, these cells should be re-pulled and re-labeled, not silently relabeled.
• HUD FMR FY2026 has now been published and panel-verified (rookd-hud-fmr-agent, June 16, 2026, against the HUD User file FY26_FMRs_revised.xlsx, effective October 1, 2025). The per-county multi-year tables intentionally remain on the FY2020 through FY2025 window (six fiscal years), normalized to the same window across all 11 counties so that every county-vs-statewide comparison stays on the same fiscal year (the statewide 2BR FMR cited above is FY2025). The FY2025 figure is the latest value used in the tables and comparisons. For reference, the panel-verified live FY2026 2BR FMRs are: Kansas City MO-KS HUD Metro FMR Area (Jackson County) $1,358; Springfield MO HUD Metro FMR Area (Greene County) $1,095; Pemiscot County $888. The Kansas City MO-KS HMFA series (FY2020 $978 through FY2025 $1,346), Pemiscot County FY2025 ($824), and Springfield FY2025 ($998) were re-verified MATCH against live HUD on June 16, 2026.
• Housing wages are reported from NLIHC Out of Reach 2025 where the published value matched the FY2025 FMR cross-check (Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbia, Jefferson City). For Springfield the value shown ($19.19) is derived from the verified FY2025 2BR FMR ($998) via the NLIHC formula (housing wage = FMR x 12 / 624); the operator should confirm against the published NLIHC area figure during verification.
• Hours-per-week figures are calculated at the current 2026 Missouri minimum wage of $15.00 using the NLIHC methodology (hours = housing wage / minimum wage x 40), except the statewide 63-hour and 52-hour figures, which are NLIHC's own published numbers at the 2025 minimum of $13.75.
• Some narrative figures (NLIHC The Gap deficit, local news statistics) were retrieved through automated web fetches whose summaries can misread a cell. Every numeric claim in this report must clear the verification panel before publication, citation, or press use.

Minimum Wage Notes

• Missouri minimum wage: $12.30 (2024) - $13.75 (2025) - $15.00 (2026), per Proposition A (2024). Future CPI indexing was repealed by HB 567 (2025); no increase is scheduled after 2026 absent new legislation. - Ballotpedia
• No Missouri locality sets a minimum wage above the state rate; a 1998-era state preemption (reinforced in 2017) bars local minimum-wage ordinances.

FMR Notes

• HUD Fair Market Rent represents the 40th percentile of gross rents in an area - 40 percent of standard-quality units rent at or below it. Actual market rents, especially in resort areas like the Lake of the Ozarks, run well above FMR.
• FMR fiscal years begin October 1 of the prior calendar year (FY2025 FMR applies starting October 1, 2024).
• Jackson County uses the Kansas City MO-KS HUD Metro FMR Area; St. Louis city and county use the St. Louis MO-IL HUD Metro FMR Area.

Vacancy Rate Notes

• Vacancy and seasonal-use figures are ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates (Tables B25002 and B25004). In resort counties (Camden, Taney) the bulk of "vacant" units are seasonal/recreational/occasional-use second homes; in St. Louis city the vacancy is overwhelmingly long-term abandonment, not second homes.

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