Report: Average Rent Needed for One-Bedroom Apartment More than Double the Minimum Wage in America

While the cost of living has continued to climb since the housing bubble popped, wages have not kept pace. People are not earning more, they’re just paying more. For everything.

Case in point: a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that no one who works a full-time minimum wage job in any state in this country could reasonably afford to pay their rent when set at the “affordable” level of 30% of one’s income.

Here’s a map showing the average wage needed to comfortably afford the rent for a two-bedroom apartment per each state:

The national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. According to the report, the average wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment is $20.30.

In other words, an average American would need to earn more than twice the minimum wage just to comfortably afford a modest two-bedroom apartment (without spending more than a third of one’s income solely on rent). The average wage needed for a one-bedroom apartment is $16.35 an hour — still more than double the minimum wage.

What this means is that one in four American renting households, some 10.4 million, cannot even afford rent on a modest apartment. As the price of everything from food to utilities continues to rise in this country, the number of people who cannot afford to make ends meet just to basically get by is going to get bigger too.

And as the number of jobs continue to decline, it kinda makes you wonder what this country is going to look like in another decade…

“There is a fundamental mismatch between the wages people earn and the price of decent housing,” the report concluded.

Related: ‘Rent-Free’ at Home: More Than 20% of Millennials Still Living with Mom and Dad

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Contributed by Piper McGowin of The Daily Sheeple.

Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple. There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it.