It’s no longer shocking, but it should be: the average price of a Manhattan apartment hovers around $2 million; in San Francisco, the median price of a home increased by 14.5 percent in the past year, and now coasts above $1.6 million; in some neighborhoods in Seattle, prices have increased 40 percent in a year. Residents of coastal cities—where land costs have soared—have become accustomed to mind-boggling house prices, but now cities like Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City are witnessing unprecedented price appreciation.
The median home price rose 41 percent faster than overall inflation between 1990 and 2016. Nearly one-third of U.S. households—38.1 million owners and renters—paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2016. While the situation has been tough for homeowners, it’s been undoubtedly worse for renters. According to the Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies, almost half of all renters are paying more than the federal benchmark of affordability of 30 percent of their gross income for housing. Fully 80 percent of renters making less than $30,000 in 2016 were deemed cost-burdened. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) found that to afford the rent for an average one-bedroom apartment, workers would need an hourly wage of $17.90 at a full-time job. (Do the math: a worker at the national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would need to work 99 hours per week, 52 weeks per year to afford the same rent.) While renters make up 36 percent of households nationwide, they’re the majority in 42 of the country’s 100 largest cities, where the housing crisis is most acute. And there’s little relief in sight.
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