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Metro claims Boston-area renters working themselves to death
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broken link
The first link doesn't work
*tear*
Very strange
Since broken links and I are dear old friends, I just tried the link again and it works. What happens when you click on it?
nothing wrong with link
It looks fine to me.
That's just
your opinion
;P
link ka-clink
um not it says i cant go there, its prob blocked from my pc. Its The Man, keeping me from metro news.
You at work?
If so, Your Man might have a content filter in place that has decided you shouldn't be looking at LiveJournal while on the job.
the man
Livejournal?umm...ok
Did you not notice the URL
Did you not notice the URL of the link either before or after you clicked on it?
Perhaps it's just as well you can't see LiveJournal at the moment. The b0st0n snarkers would chew you up and spit you back out. (Whether or not this is a "close call!" or a "more's the pity" case is up to the discretion of the reader.)
Go easy there
Hey, I'd bet she's on hour 70 of the 76 she'll need this week just to pay her rent, let alone the 40 hours she will put in for her commuting costs.
Such a shame.
The numbers are correct and
The numbers are correct and it is not a typo...look up the report. Perhaps not the best sentence in history but 100 percent correct.
Sure enough!
http://www.nlihc.org/oor/oor2008/data.cfm?getnonme...
nlihc.org/oor/oor2008/data.cfm?getmsa=on&msa=777&state=MA
OK, so the story is right, but the study is stupid
Not to dismiss the high price of housing in the Boston area, but, here's what that report says
What sort of person making minimum wage is going to try to rent a two-bedroom apartment by herself? Oh, right, a single mother, perhaps, but somebody making minimum wage who has kids would be eligible for assistance programs, such as Section 8, no?
What was their point?
I think that whatever it was, it got lost in all of the absurdist math.
I liked the "guy on the street" metric I saw in the WSJ: Some random working stiff they asked said "Most people get paid every two weeks. If you are going into that second paycheck to make your rent, you're hurting".
There is ample evidence here to make exactly that SIMPLE point about wages not keeping pace with costs of housing. At 96 hours a month to make the FMR, the typical renter is seriously dipping into that second paycheck.
74 hours
Huh. Just about correct. 74 hours, says the report
That is to say, if you make the average wage for a renter, you can't really afford a two-bedroom on just your salary without working long hours.
Which is something we kind of already knew. What we didn't know was exactly how long in the exactly averaged hypothetical kind of way.
That still doesn't add up
74 hours * $13.32 per hour * 52 weeks per year/12 months per year = $4271.8 per month.
That's a pretty pricy 2 bedroom apartment! It is also much higher than that $1273/month apartment they say is the fair market rent.
$1273 per month/$13.32 per hour = about 96 hours a month
One wee figure missing
That'd be the figure where nobody actually spends all their income on their apartment.
The assumption is that the housing is affordable:
"A unit is considered affordable if it costs no more than 30% of the renter's income."
Try them linky things. Them're where the letters turns all blue.
And, yeah, it's kinda weird reasoning that because someone thinks it's unfair (which it may well be) for an apartment to cost more than 30% of a salary that someone therefore has to work so many hours (74!) that the proportion is thereby reduced to 30%. Sorry, honey, I'm getting a third job until this apartment feels affordable to me.
30%
How long has it been since the cost of housing was that low in this area?
I remember when we paid about that a couple of decades ago, but we had two professional incomes and a small apartment in a yet to be popular area.
The real problem is that the non-rent part of the budget saw little inflation for years, and now it has dramatically risen.
The rule of thumb ten years
The rule of thumb ten years ago, if I recall correctly, was that rent should only cost about 25% of your monthly salary. Of course, that was during the dot com days, when we basically were printing money left and right and housing was cheap and plentiful.
Nowadays as far as I'm concerned, it's catch as catch can and if I can afford to live in a place and still have enough money to eat actual food and not ramen, then I'm doing all right.
Depends who you ask
It's always been that low for me. I've never paid 30% of my income in housing in Boston. But I'd be one of the few.
Part of the reason is that I've never rented in Boston. Just out of grad school, the prices seemed absurd enough for me (not just over 500 dollars, but over 1000 dollars!!!) to stretch for my first (99K) mortgage. That mortgage was lower than the monthly rent would have been.
Yeah, the study's math seems absurd. It's a long way to go to get to the conclusion: housing is not affordable in Boston if you're not making much money, and especially if you're renting.