
Mapping the Hourly Wage Needed to Rent a 2-Bedroom Apartment in Every U.S. State - aerick
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/05/mapping-the-hourly-wage-needed-to-rent-a-2-bedroom-apartment-in-every-us-state/394142/
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Brendinooo
This sort of stuff rubs me the wrong way.

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.

~~~
neuromancer2701
In additional most of these lower wage job should be for younger high school
age or college students. A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the
entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy
shouldn't be decided on corner cases.

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.

~~~
ForHackernews
> A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at
> MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided
> on corner cases.

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...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-
should-pay-too-inside-fast-food-workers-historic-protest-for-living-
wages/265714/)

~~~
stephengillie
Uniquely, it seems the act of grilling meat, and putting that between slices
of bread, is harder to automate than driving a car. Or at least it's hard to
automate for less than $15 an hour. Err $8 an hour.

~~~
neuromancer2701
I would argue that if the FEDs mandate 15$/hour, the impetus to automate the
grilling and sandwich making will increase.

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biggest_lou
Am I the only one that doesn't see the value of assessing this at the state
level? Given the drastic variability of rents within states, this seems like a
useless (not to mention misleading) unit of analysis.

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.

~~~
jobu
Agreed, county-level data would be a lot more relevant.

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mrestko
The article doesn't address why the hourly wage for 2-bedroom is relevant in
relation to say, a 1-bedroom, studio, or mansion. Looking briefly at the BLS
data, it seems that there are about equal numbers of single- and double-earner
households. It's not clear to me that a single-earner household should expect
to be able to rent a two bedroom apartment.

~~~
mhurron
How dare single parent families expect to live somewhere decent.

~~~
bpodgursky
This chart wouldn't take into account the various subsidies you would get if
you were actually making $13/hr as a single parent -- housing assistance, food
stamps, medicaid, welfare itself, etc. The effective income -- after all
assistance is accounted for -- is going be far higher than the quoted hourly
wage.

~~~
maxerickson
At $13 an hour, TANF (the best match on "Welfare") would not be available.
$25,000 per year is in the taper for the EIC, but would qualify for ~$2000
each of the first two children and a bit more for a third.

In some states, $25,000 per year would also disqualify a family of 4 from
Medicaid (but ACA subsidies would still apply).

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forgottenpass
Someone else already has already done the work for me, and written a bunch of
reasons why the conclusions people tend to draw from this less-meaningful-
than-you-think set of datapoints are faulty:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-
fa...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-
part-1-of-%E2%88%9E/)

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carlg
The idea that you could calculate a meaningful number like this for the entire
state is absurd. Perhaps if you could drill down into county or zipcode this
would be more useful.

~~~
frogpelt
Using average or even median rent is not that meaningful either. Some people
pay high rent by choice not because there aren't other options.

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toomim
The argument here is comparing the AVERAGE rental price with the MINIMUM wage,
and then concluding that the minimum wage is less than the average rental?

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.

~~~
mason240
I swear I have been seeing this average/minimum bait-and-switch everyday for
the last 3 weeks now. I don't know how something so false is having such
momentum.

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gamegoblin
Being from Arkansas, I always thought our housing prices were crazy low. When
I was in university there, I paid something like $450/mo for a two bedroom,
1000 square foot (92 square meters) apartment.

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.

~~~
NDizzle
I am also from Arkansas! I am planning on moving back in the next few years as
my remote work jobs solidify. Information like this really hammers that point
home. If you have family/friends in Arkansas, it's a cheap way to live with a
fairly reasonable quality of life - at least the NW corner where I grew up.

~~~
gamegoblin
The NW corner is where my apartment was (Fayetteville, University of
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.

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pavel_lishin
I wonder how much California and New York averages are bumped by due to places
like San Francisco and New York City.

~~~
PixelB
Keep in mind that in NYC there are very high priced apartments, but there are
also a LOT of low income housing/slums/projects where rent is dirt cheap, it's
just that people live in terrible conditions compared to what that same rent
could get you elsewhere.

~~~
pavel_lishin
That's actually another good question - does NYCHA and other low-income
housing push the average down as well? I'm not sure what it takes to qualify
to get rent assistance; seems like it's unreasonable to compare a luxury
apartment on the Upper East Side to my apartment in Hamilton Heights to a low-
income housing project.

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gopi
If someone do the same analysis for european and asian cities then it will be
apparent how affordable (relative to wage) US still is!

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shellmayr
I'm missing some definitions here. Not sure if I didn't see something, but
what are they assuming in terms of number of hours/week and what does "two-
bedroom housing wage" mean: is this just the wage at x hours/week that allows
you to rent the average 2BR or does it include some other kind of spending
like food? Because what does it help if minimum wage pays for the apartment
but I can't eat? On a different note, in relation to everyone asking why 2BR
is important: please just imagine being a single parent with, say, 1-2 kids
and a minimum wage job.

~~~
arkem
They're looking at how many hours worked at minimum wage that it would take to
afford an average priced 2 bedroom apartment, if you only spend 30% of your
income of housing.

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kanyethegreat
"Ask people what level of income would make them poor and they tend to come up
with a number that's relative to their income. In the U.S., people are
surveyed as to the amount of income necessary for a family of four to "get
along." In 1950, the answer was $48 a week (PDF), or around 75 percent of
household mean income that year. More than half a century later in 2007, the
average answer was $1,000 a week—or around 77 percent of mean income."

Shouldn't they be using the median income since it's more resistant to
outliers? Or did they just disregard the outliers?

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hwstar
1\. You can't raise the minimum wage without also having rent control or more
public (section 8) housing. People on minimum wage usually have little
negotiating power. Landlords servo the rents to what the market will bear. The
market isn't sympathetic to low wage earners.

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.

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davidw
Like Pavel says above/below, state level data like this is ok, but county
level or even finer-grained data would be a lot better. There's a _big_
difference in cost of living between Portland, Oregon and Burns, Oregon.

~~~
s73v3r
However, I would also guess there's a big difference in the amount and kind of
jobs available.

~~~
rhino369
And if you try to apply a minimum wage fit for living in portland, the
difference in amount of jobs would only grow.

