Washington - There is nowhere in this country where someone working a
full-time minimum wage job could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment,
according to an annual report released Thursday documenting the gap between
wages and the cost of rental housing.
Downsizing to a one-bedroom will only get you so far on
minimum wage.Such housing is affordable in only 12 counties located in
Arizona, Oregon and Washington states, according to the report by the National
Low Income Housing Coalition.
You would have to earn $17.14 an hour, on average, to be
able to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment in a safe area without having to
spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing. Make that $21.21 for a
two-bedroom home nearly three times the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
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The report details how much a household must earn to be able
to afford rent in every metropolitan area and county in the country. Renters in
the U.S.
make, on average, $16.38 an hour.
The minimum hourly wage required to afford rent on a
two-bedroom apartment, of course, depends on where you live - ranging from a
low of $11.46 in some counties in Georgia to a high of $58.04 in the San
Francisco Bay Area.
The most expensive state for housing is Hawaii, where workers would need to make
$35.20 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment. They would need to make
$33.58 in the District of Columbia, $30.92 in California, $28.27 in Maryland,
and $28.08 in New York.
In the District of
Columbia, where the hourly minimum wage is $12.50, a
household say a single parent - must earn $69,840 a year to be able to afford
the fair market rent of $1,746 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
Someone making the federal minimum wage would need to work
117 hours a week or nearly three full-time jobs - to be able to afford a
two-bedroom apartment.
Many of the occupations projected to add the most jobs by
2024 pay too little to cover rent.
These are customer service representatives, personal care
aides, nursing assistants, home health aides, retail salespeople, home health
and food service workers who make, on average, between $10 and $16 an hour. Those
whose earnings put them below the federal poverty level cannot even afford the
average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in any state.
The national average rent is $892 a month for a modest
one-bedroom apartment and $1,103 for a two-bedroom. As a result, more than 11.2
million families end up spending more than half their pay checks on housing,
the report said a trade-off with other basic needs such as food, transportation
and medical care.
The picture is not expected to improve in the near future as
the rental market remains strong and vacancy rates decline. A record 43.3
million households were renters in 2016, a 27 percent increase since 2006, the
report said.
Household income, meanwhile, has not kept up with the pace
of rent increases. Between the 2007 housing crisis and 2015, the average rent
in the US rose by 6 percent, after adjusting for inflation, while the average
household income declined by 4 percent, according to the report, which analyzed
Census Bureau data.
"Rents are soaring in every state and community at the
same time when most Americans haven't seen enough of an increase in their
paychecks," US Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., wrote in the report.
The report comes at a time when programs for low-income
Americans, including subsidized housing, are increasingly under threat.
The current level of public subsidies is already not enough
to meet the needs of low-income families, with only one in four eligible
households able to receive assistance, the report said. Federal funding for
housing assistance programs has declined by 3 percent between 2010 and 2017,
the report said.
President Trump, in his budget plan for the 2018 fiscal
year, recently proposed $6.2 billion in cuts to the Department of Housing and
Urban Development, the most dramatic reduction to the agency since President
Ronald Reagan slashed its funding in the early 1980s. Trump's proposal would
gut federal funding for affordable housing, along with other programs designed
to serve the poor.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition characterized the
lack of affordable rental housing as a national crisis for poor and middle
class Americans of all ethnic groups, in cities as well as rural communities.
Ellison has sponsored a bill that would reduce the popular
mortgage interest deduction, which benefits mostly high-income earners, and use
the additional tax revenue to expand access to rental homes. Each year, he
said, three-quarters of the $200 billion Congress spends on housing goes
towards subsidizing the homes of the richest families through the mortgage
interest deduction and other home-ownership tax benefits.
"This means that we provide more housing assistance to
help the richest 7 million households - who earn more than $200 000 a year than
to help the 55 million households who earn less than $50 000 each year, even
though these families are far more likely to struggle to keep a roof over their
head," Ellison wrote.
Previous proposals to reduce the mortgage interest deduction
have all failed.
WASHINGTON POST