- Gap between poor and their ability to pay rent grows, agencies say, By Tom De Poto, March 11, 2013, Star-Ledger: “A report released today by two agencies highlighted the gap between affordable rent and low-income households. Data from the U.S. Interagency on Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed that one-third of households in New Jersey were rentals. The median hourly income – half make more, and half make less – of a renter is $16.77, the report showed, while the housing wage – the hourly rate a worker needs to earn to afford a two-bedroom apartment — is $24.84. For workers earning the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, the gap was even greater…”
- California is second-most expensive state for rents, report says, By Andrew Khouri, March 11, 2013, Los Angeles Times: “A minimum wage worker in California must toil about 130 hours a week in order to feasibly afford a two-bedroom rental, a new report found. Wage earners must take home $53,627 annually, or $25.78 an hour, to afford a two-bedroom home, making California the second-least affordable state behind Hawaii, the National Low Income Housing Coalition said Monday in its annual Out of Reach report…”
- Typical Pennsylvania wage is too little to pay the average rent, By Tim Grant, March 13, 2013, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “When a basic two-bedroom apartment in Pennsylvania costs an average $895 a month, renters must earn at least $17.21 an hour — 2.4 times the state minimum wage — to afford a decent roof over their heads. Although the cost of renting a two-bedroom unit in the Pittsburgh region is lower at $772 a month, Pittsburgh households still must earn about $14.85 an hour to afford the apartment, which amounts to more than twice the state minimum wage and 117 percent of what the average city renter earns…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty