health
Housing insecurity (adults)
Why this matters
Housing insecurity measures the share of adults who, in the past year, experienced unstable housing, such as worrying about or struggling to pay rent, moving often, or facing eviction. On this platform these are modeled estimates that blend survey and population data, so they are best read as the level in each year, not as year-to-year change (the CDC does not support using them as a trend).
Unstable housing harms health and child development directly, through stress, disrupted schooling and care, and frequent moves. It is the lived-experience companion to rent burden and eviction: what cost pressure feels like in daily life.
Charlotte is a national example of this strain. Mecklenburg’s eviction caseload is among the country’s highest (around 46,000 cases filed in 2024, roughly double the 2020 level), and development along the LYNX Blue Line corridor has added displacement pressure. Local housing dashboards track filings and instability over time.
About the Charlotte region
This explorer covers the 14-county, two-state Charlotte region (11 North Carolina and 3 South Carolina counties). Many of these indicators connect to a defining regional story: a landmark Harvard study ranked Charlotte last, 50th of the 50 largest U.S. metros for economic mobility (a child raised in the poorest fifth had about a 4.4% chance of reaching the top fifth), a finding that launched the region's Leading on Opportunity agenda. Updated 2024 data show Charlotte has since climbed to 38th.
Opportunity here is also unevenly mapped. An affluent “wedge” fanning southeast from uptown holds a large majority of the city's wealth on under a quarter of its land, while a ”crescent” to the north, west, and east carries higher poverty, a legacy of redlining, exclusionary zoning, and highway routing that recurs across the race, income, health, tree-canopy, and school maps in this tool. No single indicator is good or bad on its own; together they describe how the region sorted opportunity.
Companion resources: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer · UNC Charlotte Urban Institute · Opportunity Atlas · Methods & sources
Learn more
- CDC PLACES — Health-Related Social Needs measure definitions cdc.gov
Official definition of the housing-insecurity measure and how it is estimated.
- Princeton Eviction Lab evictionlab.org
National eviction data and rankings; Charlotte ranks among the highest-filing large cities.
- Mecklenburg Housing Data mecklenburghousingdata.org
Local dashboards on eviction filings, the affordable-housing gap, and housing instability.
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer ui.charlotte.edu
Mecklenburg County’s neighborhood indicator system — 462 Neighborhood Profile Areas (a City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, and UNC Charlotte Urban Institute partnership).
About the data
Model-based small-area estimates from the CDC PLACES project (2022–2023), which uses BRFSS survey data and multilevel regression & poststratification to estimate adult prevalence for every Census tract. Each estimate has a confidence interval; values with high uncertainty are flagged.
Source: CDC PLACES (model-based small-area estimates).