Wage stagnation in Pittsburgh, U.S. hits blue-collar and service workers hardest
The East Liberty neighborhood has rumbled with demolition over the last week, as machines slowly turn the former Penn Plaza apartments into a pile of rubble.
The site, on which developers want to build high-end apartments anchored by a Whole Foods Market, has become a symbol for the development’s opponents that rising rents risk displacing residents like those who lived at Penn Plaza, many of whom were elderly and
low-income.
A report released Wednesday adds perspective to the affordable housing problem facing U.S. cities by exploring it through another dimension: the burden of rent costs on different kinds of workers.
Though Pittsburgh leads almost all major U.S. cities in the growth of workers’ wages after accounting for paying rent, that growth varies depending on a worker’s occupation, according to Apartment List, an online apartment listing company based in San Francisco.
The study — which calculated post-rent wages for people working in blue-collar, service and knowledge sectors — was a way to measure how a metro area’s changing economies are leaving certain segments of the population behind.
“Youhear broadly that U.S. wages are stagnant,” said Sydney Bennet, a content marking associate who authored the report for Apartment List, which conducts research on economic trends in the housing
While that’s true, she said, “the picture is really varied. Knowledge workers, even with rising rents, have been doing better than they were decades ago, but that’s not the case for blue-collar and service workers.”
Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ms. Bennet said she analyzed the difference between median wages among occupations and median rents for each city from 2005 to 2015.
Across the country, knowledge sector workers — people in information technology, engineering, business and legal occupations increase— saw6 wages percent. after Meanwhile,rent post-rent wages declined by 5 percent for the average blue-collar worker and by 7 percent for the service sector worker. But Pittsburgh shows that trendin a more dramatic way, as employment in knowledge sectors grew by 16 percent — outpacing the national average during that period — to feed the growing health care, financeand tech industries. There is some evidence to suggest rent costs have been kept lower here than other cities experiencing a knowledge economy boom. Ms. Bennet found Pittsburgh’s service sector workers saw post-rent wages rise 3 percent, the sixthlargest increase among cities. Blue-collar workers’ post-rent wages stayed about flat, above thenational average. The Apartment List findings mirror a 2015 study of wages that found low-wage workers in Pittsburgh fared better than the national average. But the larger issue of income inequality overshadows these small gains, othermarket. researchers have found. Earlier this month, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that no full-time minimum-wage worker in any state can, on average, afford the median rent of a two-bedroom apartment. In the Pittsburgh area, the Washington D.C.-based group found, workers would need to work more than two full-time jobs at minimum wage to afford the median two-bedroom apartmentof $822 a month.