Rents become increasingly unaffordable for many

[Newsjock]

Source: 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.

The coalition said that in no state can minimum wage workers do a typical 40-hour work week and spend less than 30% of their income on a two-bedroom unit. Washington, D.C., also was less affordable than the Golden State. There, a worker must make $27.15 per hour to afford a two-bedroom home.

... Nationally, renters needed to earn $18.79 per hour to spend less than 30% of their income on a two-bedroom home. That is significantly more than the $7.25 federal minimum wage.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/la-fi-mo-california-second-most-expensive-rent-20130311,0,1112423.story

[aquart]

1. When was the last time we built subsidized housing?

Infrastructure goin' down.

[niyad]

6. look at what happened iNOLA. thousands of low-income units demolished, not damaged by

katrina--but torn down anyway.

[freshwest]

9. Yup, they wanted to make sure 'the undesireables' couldn't return. Disaster capitalism at work.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

12. I lived in Anaheim and the big complaint was no spending on housing...

Many of the smaller apartment buildings date from the 60s and 70s. Some have been given cosmetic improvements like dual pane windows and kitchen remodeling (often with cheap countertops) but all that did was to give an excuse to charge more for an old wooden building. A lot of them don't even have AC and the temp can hit over 100 in the summer. Many use wall heaters. Some of these places are fire traps with one car garages built into them.

The fact is that most of these places are being run by people who don't want to put any money into them. Ever since the banks stopped paying interest on savings a lot of people are using rental property as an investment and they want a big return on them. Say you have a million to invest. You can either put it in the bank and collect 1% or $10,000 a year or put it into a crappy wooden 5-plex and collect rent from five families each paying you $1500 a month each (which is low) or $90,000 a year. There's a whole industry of property management companies that caters to absentee landlords so they don't have to hear a damn thing from the tenants.

Over the last 15 - 20 years the rents have skyrocketed while wages have remained flat.

Even large complexes are feeling the hit. I saw a 3 bedroom place I rented back in the late early 90s for $450 now going for $1700. That's insane considering wages haven't gone up by much since then. People are paying more for rent than they would for a mortgage.

The property value on purchasing a home is even more insane. A run down place with a dead lawn, a bad roof, leaky plumbing and rats in the attic feeding on roaches in the kitchen with graffiti on the garage door goes for the cost of lake front property back east.

I keep hearing the same thing as an excuse. "No snow".

[johnsolaris]

15. The 235 Housing program

Hi,

In the late 60's a Housing Program was passed by Congress & came to be known by Realtors as the 235 houses named for the section in the congressional bill. This bill allowed low income Families to buy smaller but affordable homes. Home Builders rushed to jump in this new market and make money or in today's Language: Stimulate the Economy.

My Father sold houses at this time & during the summer when I was home from college I also sold for a Realtor. All this was done in good faith & we thought we were helping people move up in the world by owning a home. I was always thrilled to have a Veteran come in & want to buy a house, since any Veteran with a job automatically qualified for a housing loan.

In the end it turned out to be a disaster, Scores & scores of homes were foreclosed when people stopped making payments for a variety of reasons. The Program was eventually discontinued & The economy did not improve if you remember for many years due to many factors. The Vietnam war one of the reasons, Detroit was having problems and there were a lot of jobless people all over the country for a variety of reasons.

I do not know the answer to the Housing problem & we are still in one. There are still large numbers of Foreclosed houses all over the country today & a few in my neighborhood. This is something Congress should be working on, but it will never happen as long as the Republicans control the House in Washington.

[Puzzledtraveller]

20. Screw that, keep the subsidized housing, these people need higher wages

They build em like shit to begin with, put them in the worst areas, it's a carrot to keep the impoverished off the streets protesting.

[Walk away]

2. Who spends 30% of their income on housing????

It's more like 50% for your average home owner around here.

[freshwest]

3. Or 75% depending on how low one's income is.

[geek tragedy]

19. Anyone getting a mortgage after 2007. nt

[WillyT]

5. Check Out San Francisco... For A One-Bedroom...

Found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/07/zumpercom-maps-average-rental-rates_n_2832674.html

[Mr. Mojo Risen]

7. I live in Oakland

And I feel lucky to have a decent one bedroom for "only" $895 per month.

[glinda]

10. Am now grateful our house payments are lower than that even though

when we sell we will loose all of our down payment and then some..... after looking at the picture.

[Jack Sprat]

11. Unless salaries are commensurate with rents,

how do people afford these rents? Is this one of those areas where most jobs pay lots more than other parts of the country?

What if the federal government built affordable housing in all these areas in SF? What if they built them on the concept of offering affordable housing rather than making big profits? Then, I suppose the private landlords would raise holy hell and try to sue to have them razed.

But, I don't understand why housing and jobs aren't provided by our government. In my opinion, if the private sector cannot meet the needs of the population, then government needs to become active in satisfying those needs. In my perspective, everything to do with the private sector is conceived to screw the public.

[JDPriestly]

16. It's the geography. There is no place to build in San Francisco.

[Heywood J]

18. I hear there's this thing called Golden Gate Park that would be perfect

for putting up a bunch of high-rise condo towers. You could probably fit a hundred of them in, then charge $1,000,000 for a one-bedroom condo.

[Sirveri]

21. They afford it via room mates and rent control.

At least that's how it was when I looked at it last. I'll never live in the city, it's just too expensive and the jobs aren't the type of jobs I do. Wanna be poor in CA, you're going to have to have room mates. Even then when I was doing that in Fremont I was paying about 450/mo +utilities for a room in a 4 bedroom house. That was back in 2002...

[midnight]

8. K&R

[Lobo27]

13. Rents are a rip off...

Here in Texas, I live in suburb of Dallas, called Mesquite. I'm currently buying a 4 bedroom brick house w/ garage, and my mortgage is 860 a month.

Before I got the house, I was living in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my rent was 1050 the first year. The second year they upped it to 1190. Crazy, Crazy...

[Starry Messenger]

14. If I didn't share rent with my fiance' I'd have to live with mom.

Even with both our pay combined we got turned down for the first one bedroom we looked at in San Bruno because we didn't make 3x the rent asked for, their baseline for considering tenants. San Bruno. o.O

[Le Taz Hot]

17. That's an AVERAGE.

L.A., San Diego, the coast and the Bay Area are MUCH more expensive than other parts of California so they drive up the average. The rest of California isn't near that expensive.