By admin 
A new report has found that Californians need to earn more than residents of any other state to afford to rent a modest apartment.
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Californians need to make an hourly wage of $52.79 in order to rent a two-bedroom apartment without paying more than 30% of their income on housing — also called a fair “housing wage.” That translates to a monthly income of $9,151, or $109,812 annually.
The report was published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit which advocates for affordable housing policy, . It relies on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Market Rent, which represents the 40th percentile of gross rents for standard rental units of recent movers. California’s Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,745.
The housing wage for California’s one-bedroom apartments is also relatively high at $43.01. At California’s minimum wage of $16.90 an hour or $879 a month, a person would have to work 125 hours per week to afford a 2-bedroom rental home or 102 hours for a 1-bedroom equivalent.
The statistics were a bit less bleak for the Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade metropolitan area, where the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,225. The affordable housing wage for a two-bedroom home in the Sacramento urban area is $43.37, or $35.23 for a one-bedroom home.
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Around 5.98 million California households are rented, or 44% overall, according to the report. The state accounts for eight of the country’s 10 most expensive metropolitan areas for housing, with Santa Cruz County and the San Francisco area (Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties) taking the top two spots.
Nationally, the housing wage is $34.73 per hour for a modest two-bedroom rental and $29.19 for a one-bedroom rental. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.
After California, the states with the second and third-highest affordable housing wages were Hawaii at $49.38 and Massachusetts at $48.59.
The full report and state data is available on the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s website.
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