Don't worry, you can't afford to live here.
An analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners has revealed that over a quarter of U.S. renters use at least half of their household's income to pay rent.
Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department. "It means making really difficult trade-offs," said Angela Boyd, a vice president at Enterprise Community Partners. "There are daily financial dilemmas about making their rent or buying groceries."
Anyone who rents knows how the market is out there. If you happen to live in an area that has the promise of work, those rents go up.
More than 30 percent of renters in California, Florida, New Jersey and New York state devote at least half their incomes to housing and utilities, according to the analysis. Other than Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming, at least 20 percent of renters in every state face similarly high costs relative to income.
When you consider that the United States government considers a rent that takes up more than 30% of your family's income to be a burden, and you begin to look at people living below the poverty line, the number of unaffordable housing grows.
Nowhere is the democratic challenge of affordability more obvious than in the case of housing. According to a 2014 report issued by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 35 percent of U.S. households in 2012 were in housing that they could not afford. In other words, just over one in every three American households was paying in excess of 30 percent of their income in housing alone. If we break down this statistic and look just at renters, more than 50 percent are cost-burdened. The picture becomes even more alarming when we train our gaze on Americans with lower levels of income. Among households with annual incomes of less than $15,000 – which roughly equates to working year-round at the federal minimum wage – more than four out of every fifth household spent 30 percent or more of its income on housing, and almost 70 percent spent more than half their income on housing.
[bold my emphasis] When you consider the resources being put into luxury towers, the wealthy are setting up a combustable situation.