Renters — and the cost burdens associated with renting — are on the rise across the country. Two recent studies say so, so we might as well cite them here. One, by Enterprise Community Partners and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, projects that renter households will increase by 4.2 million over the next 10 years. Another, by the Urban Institute, puts that number at 6 million. And the share of rental households that’s “severely cost-burdened” – that is, paying 50 percent of income or more for housing – will go up 11 to 25 percent under various economic scenarios, says the former study.

Meanwhile, says the Urban Institute, the home ownership rate will go down for all but the oldest population segment. The explanations of these and other stark housing projects are familiar – among them, that college-debt-burdened Millennials aren’t moving into the house-buying market the way their age group did a generation or two ago.

Here we inject the good news/bad news for Vermont.

The home ownership rate here is above the national average and has not mirrored the national drop over the last few years.

Rental cost-burden rates here are, however, about at the national average: 26 percent of Vermont’s renters are “severely cost burdened,” according to Vermont Housing Data.

If the renter population swells in Vermont, how likely is it that the number of affordable housing units keeps pace? Not very, without some form of government intervention. Here’s what the Enterprise/Harvard study says about that:

“The need for affordable housing is already overwhelming the capacity of federal, state and local governments to supply assistance. At last measure, 11.2 million extremely low-income households competed for 7.3 million units affordable to them – a 3.9 million unit shortfall. And with 7.7 million unassisted very low-income renters with worst case housing needs in 2013 as defined by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), only just over a quarter (26 percent) of eligible very low-income households received rental assistance.”

Now, some might argue that if private developers are simply turned loose to produce a flood of new housing, affordability will take care of itself.

That’s not likely, either. Check out the state of affairs in Portland, Ore.,  a place that has experienced both a building boom and an unaffordability boom, and where the mayor just declared a “state of emergency for housing and homelessness.”