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Minimum Wage Workers in Washington Must Work 93 Hours a Week to Afford a Two-Bedroom Apartment
even in Arkansas, the state with the cheapest housing in the country. One would need to earn $13.84 an hour — about $29,000 a year — to afford a two-bedroom apartment there. The minimum wage in Arkansas is $8.50 an hour.
Massachusetts, where the minimum wage is $11 an hour, ranks as the sixth most expensive state, with a wage of $28.64 needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment ($59,571 a year). And in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan area, nearly five dollars an hour more is needed than the state figure, at $33.46 ($69,600 a year).
Downsizing to a one-bedroom apartment will only help so much.
According to the report, a one-bedroom is affordable for minimum-wage workers in only 22 counties in five states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Those states all set their minimum wages higher than the federal minimum of $7.25.
In Massachusetts, renters would need to make $23.15 an hour to afford a one-bedroom, the report said. In the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan area, that rises to $27.33.
Nationally, one would have to earn $17.90 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment or $22.10 an hour for a two-bedroom rental. That’s based on the common budgeting standard of spending a maximum of 30 percent of income on housing.
The report estimates that renters nationally make an average of $16.88 an hour. That means even those making above minimum wage struggle to afford rent.
The low-wage workforce is projected to grow over the next decade, particularly in service-sector jobs such as personal-care aides and food-preparation workers.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has tried cutting federal housing subsidies for the lowest-income Americans. As it stands, only 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rent assistance gets any help, the report said. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson recently proposed tripling rent for the poorest households and making it easier for housing authorities to impose work requirements on those receiving rent subsidies.
And these are the jobs that are being created Min wage jobs .. it is also where the shortage of workers are ,, shocking
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