5 ms·

Mapping the Hourly Wage Needed to Rent a 2-Bedroom Apartment in Every U.S. State

57 points by aerick 11y ago

pavel_lishin 11y ago
I wonder how much California and New York averages are bumped by due to places like San Francisco and New York City.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Yes, "by state" seems like a terrible way to do this. By county, or some division around that size, would make a lot more sense.
- PixelB 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
mrestko 11y ago
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.
- realbarack 11y ago
  I'm guessing picking two-bedrooms is a proxy for families: one for parent(s) and one for child(ren).
- pjonesdotca 11y ago
  So then by your logic, all the single income families are consigned to only living in one bedroom apartments? This seems like a logic fail to me.
  - frogpelt 11y ago
    It's not logic fail. It's emotional fail. Logic fail is claiming there is a logical reason why all single wage earners SHOULD be paid enough to afford a two-bedroom rental in their current location. Emotions might tell you that but logic does not.
    - pjonesdotca 11y ago
      For much of the 20th century and perhaps as far back as the 19th a single earner was capable of not only providing a multi bedroom apartment but also a house. You should look into why this has changed and ask yourself why you are OK with that change.
      - lotharbot 11y ago
        Both of my grandfathers built their own homes in 1951 or 1952. Both original houses were around 800 sqft, and eventually expanded to around 1600 sqft over the course of decades. According to the US census bureau [0] the median new home constructed in the US is around 2100 sqft. If you dig deeper into the data [1] you'll find that the characteristics of housing in the US have changed drastically since the days of mostly single-income households -- homes are much larger, with more amenities. The average dwelling for someone below the poverty line right now is bigger and has better amenities than the average dwelling for Americans as a whole in 1970. One pair of my grandparents is still living, in the same house. Houses that have sold on their block in the last few months were all around 800 sqft and went for an average of $95,000 -- which is an affordable 3.2 times the median income in the neighborhood (it's a poor neighborhood.) A single earner can provide a house, provided it's a house similar to what single earners could provide decades ago -- but there aren't many of those on the market. We keep building bigger houses and then wonder why the poor can't afford to keep up. [0] https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf [1] http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html
gamegoblin 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
carlg 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
Brendinooo 11y ago
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.
- humbleMouse 11y ago
  Well said, I was trying to find a way to say this without sounding like a dick, you did a very good job!
- neuromancer2701 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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-should-pay-too-inside-fast-food-workers-historic-protest-for-living-wages/265714/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-s...
biggest_lou 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Agreed, county-level data would be a lot more relevant.
gopi 11y ago
If someone do the same analysis for european and asian cities then it will be apparent how affordable (relative to wage) US still is!
toomim 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Because poor people have to compete inn the greater rental market like the rest of us. And there aren't as many of the minimum rental units as are needed.
forgottenpass 11y ago
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-facebook-part-1-of-%E2%88%9E/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa...
kanyethegreat 11y ago
"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?
shellmayr 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
davidw 11y ago
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 11y ago
  However, I would also guess there's a big difference in the amount and kind of jobs available.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    And if you try to apply a minimum wage fit for living in portland, the difference in amount of jobs would only grow.
hwstar 11y ago
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.

57 points by aerick 11y ago

pavel_lishin 11y ago

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

mikeash 11y ago
Yes, "by state" seems like a terrible way to do this. By county, or some division around that size, would make a lot more sense.
PixelB 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

mrestko 11y ago

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.

realbarack 11y ago
I'm guessing picking two-bedrooms is a proxy for families: one for parent(s) and one for child(ren).
pjonesdotca 11y ago
So then by your logic, all the single income families are consigned to only living in one bedroom apartments? This seems like a logic fail to me.
- frogpelt 11y ago
  It's not logic fail. It's emotional fail. Logic fail is claiming there is a logical reason why all single wage earners SHOULD be paid enough to afford a two-bedroom rental in their current location. Emotions might tell you that but logic does not.
  - pjonesdotca 11y ago
    For much of the 20th century and perhaps as far back as the 19th a single earner was capable of not only providing a multi bedroom apartment but also a house. You should look into why this has changed and ask yourself why you are OK with that change.
    - lotharbot 11y ago
      Both of my grandfathers built their own homes in 1951 or 1952. Both original houses were around 800 sqft, and eventually expanded to around 1600 sqft over the course of decades. According to the US census bureau [0] the median new home constructed in the US is around 2100 sqft. If you dig deeper into the data [1] you'll find that the characteristics of housing in the US have changed drastically since the days of mostly single-income households -- homes are much larger, with more amenities. The average dwelling for someone below the poverty line right now is bigger and has better amenities than the average dwelling for Americans as a whole in 1970. One pair of my grandparents is still living, in the same house. Houses that have sold on their block in the last few months were all around 800 sqft and went for an average of $95,000 -- which is an affordable 3.2 times the median income in the neighborhood (it's a poor neighborhood.) A single earner can provide a house, provided it's a house similar to what single earners could provide decades ago -- but there aren't many of those on the market. We keep building bigger houses and then wonder why the poor can't afford to keep up. [0] https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf [1] http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

gamegoblin 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

carlg 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

Brendinooo 11y ago

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.

humbleMouse 11y ago
Well said, I was trying to find a way to say this without sounding like a dick, you did a very good job!
neuromancer2701 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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-should-pay-too-inside-fast-food-workers-historic-protest-for-living-wages/265714/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-s...

biggest_lou 11y ago

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 11y ago
Agreed, county-level data would be a lot more relevant.

gopi 11y ago

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

toomim 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
s73v3r 11y ago
Because poor people have to compete inn the greater rental market like the rest of us. And there aren't as many of the minimum rental units as are needed.

forgottenpass 11y ago

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

kanyethegreat 11y ago

"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?

shellmayr 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

davidw 11y ago

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 11y ago
However, I would also guess there's a big difference in the amount and kind of jobs available.
- rhino369 11y ago
  And if you try to apply a minimum wage fit for living in portland, the difference in amount of jobs would only grow.

hwstar 11y ago

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.