A decent two-bedroom rental today will cost you on average more than you could afford working full time on the local minimum wage everywhere in America — in every state, every county, every metropolitan area. No matter how you draw the geography. Whether you live in Sioux Falls or San Francisco.
What the government considers to be a local "fair market rent" for a two-bedroom would eat up more than 30 percent of a minimum-wage worker's earnings. This fact, from updated data annually compiled by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, addresses a small number of scenarios. Most renters make more than the minimum wage. And many workers who do may not need two bedrooms or rely on just one income.
But the national pattern — the minimum wage isn't really a "housing wage" anywhere in America, even at 40 hours a week — hints at the difficulty of being a poor single parent. And it's just the most dire expression of an affordable housing crunch affecting renters much farther up the income spectrum, too.
Most renter households making 30 percent of the local median income couldn't afford a fair-market two bedroom, either. And evenmedian-income renter households can't in much of the country.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...you-in-every-county/]
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