Honolulu Workers Need $39 An Hour To Afford A 2-Bedroom Rental

But that's still nearly double the Arkansas minimum wage of $8.50. To afford a two-bedroom apartment, you'd need to make more than $60 an hour. When looking at the most common jobs for Ohioans, only two of the 10 offer a livable wage for employers.

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Minimum wage earners can no longer afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan area, almost five dollars an hour more is needed than the state figure, at $33.46 ($69,600 a year). And a one-bedroom is available to those low-wage workers in only 22 counties in five states: Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington.

It gets even worse in other metropolitan areas.

The Hawai'i Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice outlined details of the Out of Reach 2018 report, compiled by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The county's "housing wage", or the amount you'd need to make per hour to spend no more than 30% of your income on rent, is $38.73 an hour. The hourly wage necessary to afford a two-bedroom unit in Hawaii County is $25.42. Luckily, the average wage of a renter in Cuyahoga County is $15.38, further promoting Cleveland as " a very affordable, decent place to live". Compared to other states, Washington ranks as the eighth most expensive state for a two-bedroom apartment. It's an annual report to document the gap between wages and the cost of rental housing across the United States. Pitkin's housing wage is $33.40, which is the highest in the state.

The Aloha State also had the biggest shortfall between that target wage and the wage paid to the average renter.

The mean Washington renter makes $19 an hour, according to the report.

In a preface to the report, Senator Bernie Sanders writes that "wages have been stagnant for decades, while the cost of housing keeps going up". At the same time, new rental construction has tilted toward the luxury market because of increasingly high development costs, the report said.

From 2005 to 2015, the number of homes nationwide renting for $2,000 or more per month increased by 97 percent. "Building that political will take a combination of increased civic engagement-to ensure that low-income renters vote at similar rates as higher income homeowners - and expanded coalitions that include the health, education, civil rights and faith-based communities, all of which have a stake in ensuring more people are affordably housed".

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. "The administration's cruel and shortsighted proposals to cut housing benefits would add to the struggles of millions". 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.