Renting getting ‘Out of Reach’
Report: A minimum-wage worker would need almost 4 full-time jobs to afford a 2-bedroom rental
If you want to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the South Bay, you’d better make close to $50 an hour — or roughly $100,000 a year — according to a startling new report that pegs all three of the nation’s most expensive regions for renters squarely within the Bay Area.
It’s even worse in
San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, where workers need to net $60 an hour, or about
$125,000. In the East
Bay, it’s $45 an hour, or $93,000 a year, according to the “Out of
Reach” study released Wednesday by the National Low Income
Housing Coalition.
The new numbers highlight the dire situation that confronts many local workers as they’re forced to cram into small, overcrowded apartments or commute long distances from cheaper neighborhoods in the
Central Valley and beyond.
“Even if you have two or three minimum-wage jobs, you’re still not going to be able to make ends meet,” said Tom Myers, executive director of Mountain View-based nonprofit Community Services Agency. “That’s why we’re seeing an increase in homelessness, that’s why we’re
“Just because you’re employed does not mean you’re going to have enough money to afford housing. And that’s the real tragedy in this.” — Tom Myers, executive director of Community Services Agency
seeing an increase in people living in their vehicles and an increase in people coming to us for services.”
In San Jose, where the minimum wage is $13.50 an hour, workers would have to hold down 3.6 full-time, minimum-wage jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment. When the city’s minimum salary increases to $15 next year, workers will need 3.2 jobs.
It’s not just the Bay Area where rents are out of reach for low-income earners. There is no state, metropolitan area or county in the U.S. where workers earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom rental home by working 40 hours a week, according to the study. But the San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland metro areas rank as the first, second and third most expensive regions in the country, respectively. Honolulu is number four, and the Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut area is number five.
“It’s a national problem,” said Andrew Aurand, vice president of research for the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
The researchers based their findings on each region’s fair market rent — a number set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that estimates the standard cost of rent and utilities in an area. The National Low Income Housing Coalition used that number to calculate the hourly wage a household must earn to afford a home while spending 30 percent or less of their income on rent.
Workers at the Community Services Agency, which provides housing,
food and health care assistance to families in need, are seeing firsthand how the imbalance between wages and rent prices is impacting the Bay Area. Five years ago, about 3,000 people came to the organization each year for food, Myers said. Now that number is well over 7,000.
And many people coming to the organization for help have jobs.
“Just because you’re employed does not mean you’re going to have enough money to afford housing,” Myers said. “And that’s the real tragedy in this.”
Even workers earning more than the minimum wage are struggling. In the Oakland metropolitan area, which includes Alameda and Contra Costa counties, renters earn an average of $22 an hour — much more than Oakland’s $13.23 minimum wage. Still, at that salary, renters would need to work two full-time jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to the study.
There are several things exacerbating the affordability issue on a national level, according to the coalition’s researchers. Over the past decade, construction of new rental units has been geared toward the high end of the market. While the rental market added more than 6.7 million housing units between 2005 and 2015, the number of units renting for less than $800 dropped by more than 260,000, according to the report.
To make matters worse, the nation’s low-income jobs are the ones growing the fastest. Out of the 10 industries projected to see the most growth between 2016 and 2026, just three pay a median wage that would allow a renter to afford a one or two-bedroom home, the researchers wrote, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The low-income professions poised for dramatic growth include home health aides, waiters and waitresses, and janitors.
To remedy the situation, the coalition urges Congress to invest in housing assistance.
Without that help, experts say families will continue to be priced out of their homes, particularly in the Bay Area.
“This is a crisis that’s not only affecting the most impoverished people,” said Daniel Cooperman, program director for Bay Area Community Services, “but it’s folks that have lived generation after generation in this area and are now being displaced.”