Mapping the Hourly Wage Needed to Rent a 2-Bedroom Apartment in Every U.S. State
citylab.com
citylab.com
I live about 20 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. When I graduated college 6 years ago, I held down a restaurant job while doing an internship that would eventually lead to my first full-time job in my field. I had a roommate who worked at a hotel. We found a two-bedroom apartment (a house split into 3 units) that was going for $425/month plus utilities. Because we split, I had to pay about $300/month to keep a roof over my head. I think I was making $8/hr, so the first week of the month mostly covered my living expenses (not including taxes and the like of course). Very different than the 78 hours that shows for PA.
Anecdotal, I know, but the point being that if you're willing to make tradeoffs, you can find a way to live. My friend in Manhattan takes on two roommates to make his rent affordable. After my spouse and I got a house, we rented out our spare bedroom for a time to help pay down school loans and provide an affordable space for friends. I always remind myself that my grandmother was one of 13 children in a 3-bedroom home, and that many immigrant families of her generation had a boarder to help cover costs.
There are always edge cases that need to be dealt with compassionately - the single, unskilled mom with a few kids, etc. But the underlying assumption of articles like this seems to be that minimum wage should get you a 2BR apartment, and that's a premise that I don't agree with.
Youth unemployment is significantly higher than the national average and if wages are mandated even higher then no one will take the chance on a 15 year old.
Maybe you think they shouldn't be, but statistics show they are. Good jobs are hard to come by and the median age of fast-food workers is 28[0] (meaning half are older than that). It's absolutely not a weird corner case. It's a very common thing, and if we don't want adults with kids working those jobs, we're going to have to reverse decades of economic trends and start creating lots of better-paying jobs for marginally skilled workers.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-s...
By that I mean secure accomodation (not large, but comfortable), food and transport.
But I don't think it's fair to expect it to support a family or a solo apartment.
Because a lot of minimum wage workers do live with mom and dad or live in a bunch of buddies. Artificially increasing their salaries hurts families who have to pay more for products and services.
That is something that occurred in the early days of industrialization, and still occurs in factory towns in newly industrializing economies, but not in the contemporary US. Where everyone is expected to finance a car and a single-family detached house.
See also the recent HN discussion about trailer parks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9592812
Barracks-style housing is just so much further than higher-density housing though. About the only time true barracks accommodations are built is for factories or similar institutions in specific circumstances.
or, phrased another way, the underlying assumption is that if your labor isn't worth a full 2BR apartment to your employer, you shouldn't be allowed to work for part of it, you should be forced to rely on government entirely.
I think it's a good thing that low-wage employees are partially government-subsidized, not because I like government subsidies, but because I dislike hard thresholds and cutoffs that make people have to jump over a significant gap in order to make small net gains.
And, as you say, there's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to afford a 2BR apartment on your own. My sister can't afford a 2BR apartment, so she lives in a spare room in my house. My friends (teen parents) likewise can't afford a 2BR apartment, so they live in the other spare room in my house. There's certainly an argument to be made for doing more to subsidize corner cases (single unskilled mom with a few kids, no source of child support, etc.) but messing with the minimum wage isn't a particularly effective method.
Even worse, this kind of sensationalism around rising rents seems to be bringing the rent control zombie back to life in a number of cities. What a disaster that would be.
Logic fail is claiming there is a logical reason why all single wage earners SHOULD be paid enough to afford a two-bedroom rental in their current location. Emotions might tell you that but logic does not.
One pair of my grandparents is still living, in the same house. Houses that have sold on their block in the last few months were all around 800 sqft and went for an average of $95,000 -- which is an affordable 3.2 times the median income in the neighborhood (it's a poor neighborhood.) A single earner can provide a house, provided it's a house similar to what single earners could provide decades ago -- but there aren't many of those on the market. We keep building bigger houses and then wonder why the poor can't afford to keep up.
[0] https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf
I don't want to diminish the very real struggle some families have with finding adequate housing. But I do think that the linked article has no real clear thesis other than that they wish housing was cheaper. I'd venture that everyone wants that to be true, always, and forever.
In some states, $25,000 per year would also disqualify a family of 4 from Medicaid (but ACA subsidies would still apply).
Should a 19 year old community college student get 20 bucks an hour scooping ice cream because that's what you'd need to support a family of 5?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa...
Well no shit!
States that have rich people will have a higher average. But there are also plenty of cheap 2-bedroom apartments too!
Why don't you compare the MINIMUM available 2-bedroom price with the MINIMUM wage? Then you can see if our poor can afford to live.
Then I moved to Seattle and pay 6x as much per square foot. That's to be expected, I guess. Seattle is much more desirable than Arkansas.
Central Arkansas is more expensive, but still extremely affordable compared to the rest of the country. My sister just bought a 3 bedroom house in a good neighborhood in Little Rock for < $150K. It would easily cost $600K+ here in Seattle.
Shouldn't they be using the median income since it's more resistant to outliers? Or did they just disregard the outliers?
2. The California prices mentioned seem to be weighted to population (Rent in large cities). I have a 2br. rental unit in the eastern sierra, and the market there only allows me to charge $900.00/Month.