The National Low Income Housing Coalition has released its latest "Out of Reach" report which shows how America's housing crisis is affecting millions of renters. The report focuses on a central statistic, the Housing Wage, which is an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn to afford a rental home without spending more than 30% of his or her income on housing costs. The 2019 Housing Wage is $22.96 for a modest two-bedroom home and $18.65 for a modest one-bedroom home based on the “fair market rent”. A worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would have to work nearly 127 hours per week – equivalent to more than three full-time jobs – to afford the two-bedroom option. That is not just a regional problem. There is not a single state, metro area or county in the country where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom property.
That problem isn’t just confined to workers on the minimum wage. The research also found that the average renter’s hourly wage is $1.08 less than the one-bedroom Housing Wage and $5.39 less than the two-bedroom Housing Wage. That means that an average renter has to work 52 hours a week to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment which becomes increasingly difficult if that renter is a single parent or somebody working with a disability. Worryingly, the report states that the median-wage worker in eight of the nation’s ten largest occupations does not earn enough to afford an apartment with one bedroom.
While software developers, general managers and registered nurses are able to cover both rental options, the same cannot be said of a whole swathe of other jobs. For example, medical assistants, laborers and janitors are among those who are falling short. As mentioned above, the gap back to workers on the minimum wage, such as waiters and fast food employees, is even greater still. These are the jobs that are expected to see the biggest growth up to 2026 and that is likely to result in an even greater disparity between wages and housing costs over the coming decade.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
Housing wage vs median hourly wage of jobs with the largest projected growth.
