As most millennials know, housing costs have been steadily rising in recent years while incomes, sadly, have remained mostly stagnant. A group called The National Low Income Housing Coalition released research this week underlining this growing disparity between what most U.S. residents earn and what they need to earn in order to afford housing in their state, called the “Out of Reach” report. Its researchers calculated what the coalition calls “the housing wage,” or how much a full-time worker would have to earn to afford rent so that just 30% of their income—the recommended percentage—goes towards this expense.
Nationally, the coalition found that this housing wage is $20.30 hourly, which means that someone earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 would have to work 112 hours in one week in order to afford rent. In some cities, like Oakland, for example, the report found that workers would have to make double what they’re actually earning in order to reasonably get by. Half of the top 10 cities on the list, as a matter of fact, are located in California, where a housing crisis has caused rents to skyrocket and most metropolitan areas in the state require wages over $30 an hour to sustain rents.
Read the full report here.
