Headline: “5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60,000 a year to afford the typical rent; now they need to make almost $80,000”
5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60k, they made $69k. Now they need to make “almost $80k”, they make $77k. When you put numbers to it, it seems less stark.
Median household income in 2024 is $77,400.
Median household income in 2019 was $68,700.
Median individual income is $47,684 in 2019
https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income is $58,084 in 2023 a little hard to find
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income extrapolated from first quarter data of 2024 is $59,228
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Rent units median in January 2024 is>
Overall $1,712
Studio $1,434
1-bed $1,591
2-bed $1,892
https://www.realtor.com/research/january-2024-rent/
2019 Total:$1,097
No bedroom:$934
1 bedroom: $953
2 bedrooms: $1,086
3 bedrooms: $1,217
4 bedrooms: $1,519
5 or more bedrooms $1,586
https://data.census.gov/table?q=B25031: Median Gross Rent by Bedrooms&y=2019
I’m trying so goddamn hard not to lose all hope
Stay with us comrade. We need you for the revolution.
What revolution lmao? As soon as things get a little bit spicy all the equality hobbiest say it’s going too far
this is true. americans will not revolt unless they are starving or something
public housing needs to double and the requirements to get on it need to be slashed.
Median individual income is $47,684 in 2019
https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income is $58,084 in 2023 a little hard to find
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income extrapolated from first quarter data of 2024 is $59,228
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Rent units median in January 2024 is>
Overall $1,712
Studio $1,434
1-bed $1,591
2-bed $1,892
https://www.realtor.com/research/january-2024-rent/
2019 Total:$1,097
No bedroom:$934
1 bedroom: $953
2 bedrooms: $1,086
3 bedrooms: $1,217
4 bedrooms: $1,519
5 or more bedrooms $1,586
https://data.census.gov/table?q=B25031: Median Gross Rent by Bedrooms&y=2019
We need both, Rent Control and more housing. Land-lording has also been invaded by capitalists looking to squeeze humans for every cent and govt needs to stem that tide too. Rent has been soaring in the biggest capitalist zones, US and EU/CA.
Cap rent rises in England and Wales, Labour-commissioned report says
I really don’t know how people are existing in today’s hellhole of a capitalistic landscape. I’m fairly lucky with a good-paying job and a lowish house payment. I’m still paying a lot more for food and whatnot than I did before covid.
I always think the same and can’t stop feeling bad. I used to live in an apartment the payment kept creeping up until I said fuck it and bought a house 6 years ago. My mortgage is $1000. People now pay $2000+ a month for an apartment. This is a fucked time to be a renter.
Why do people always turn these posts into opportunities to brag about how low their house payment is?
The human race is truly fucked ain’t it? We are all out for ourselves. Nothing will ever change.
What single contributing factor would you say carries the most weight? Throughout history there has been inequality, but never like this. Even medieval peasants worked less than modern Americans.
Source?
Edit:lol downvoted for posting a source.
Thanks, the medieval worker put in much longer work hours, which is interesting
Of course you’re paying more, it’s called inflation. You also have a higher income than you did before COVID, but you didn’t mention that
And just for context, if you work 40 hours a week for $15 (well above minimum wage), your annual pre-tax income is $31,200.
The workers of the US really need unionize. Here in Scandinavia the average pre-tax income is closer to $84,000 with a 36-hour work week. We do however have a higher tax-rate, so that ends up at around $45,000 after taxes. Cost of living is also generally higher that the US. Of course that higher tax gives us free health care and education.
The extra fun thing is that Americans don’t have that much lower of a tax burden. Only the wealthiest and those with investment-based income really pay appreciably lower taxes than in countries such as yours. However, the populace in the US gets far, far lower return on investment for their taxes (which has been continuously being reduced since Regan).
That’s definitely not a solution. You just made the argument against it. The U.S. government is the primary reason why our economy is effed.
Nah, it’s because we don’t tax the wealthy and corporations as the average individual, and let the “market” dictate the price of inelastic sectors ie Healthcare, Food, and Housing.
Housing is elastic. I lived with my dad until I was like 30 because of housing prices.
It’s a good thing Republicans are NOT trying to make Homelessness ILLEGAL and punishable by PRISON!
Article behind a paywall
Okay… now they need $20,100 dollars more per year.
Cut the journalists some slack; ChatGPT 4.0 subscriptions can get expensive.
I keep reading articles like this. Between rent being too expensive, home prices going through the roof, food prices outpacing wage growth, car and home insurance going up just because it can, utilities getting more expensive, my question is when does it just become too much. The whole thing just screams corporate greed and I’m getting sick of it. I make 60% more than I did 20 years ago and I feel like I’m barely scraping by.
Food prices have not outpaced salaries for more than a year now
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Food up 2.2%
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
Private wages up 4.3%
I mean… I’m up in Canada but in one of the highest cost of living cities in the country which isn’t as bad as San Francisco or NYC but it’s bad…
20k is 1666 a month extra.
The only thing thats gone up $1666 a month more would be a larger house.
Fancy 1 bedrooms are up to 2000-2500 and they were never $334 to 734 even 15 years ago.
Something is wrong with that headline or their math
Rent as a percentage of income. General rule (and what I’m assuming the article is using without getting around the paywall) is 1/3 of your income should be rent. So if the avg rent in 2019 was $1666 and it’s now $2000 you should be making $80k/year instead of $60K.
I’m old enough to have learned that housing should be 1/4 of your take home pay
No worries, we all got bigass raises, right?
I did.
My income has gone up 50% since the pandemic. So did most of my friends who were working in any technical fields.
The economy is skewed. I keep telling my friends to learn to code or learn basic IT skills… and they just actively refuse and continue doing manual labor jobs and complaining about how they can’t make more money. And such is there lot.
A few peopel I know moved into healthcare, and are doing financially much better, but their jobs are very high stress due to the shortages.
Your solution does not apply to the whole society, it’s just a patch to make your life easier but globally it doesn’t fix anything. This is part of the american mindset: “fuck everyone else while I’m doing great”… don’t get me wrong, I understand your point of view but this is not how we move forward.
It sounds like you’re describing the same thing that happened when we globalized manufacturing. Economists said everyone would retrain and go to other fields, but it just doesn’t seem to happen IRL.
people hate change. that’s why.
Bro if everyone moves to the jobs that pay enough to live decently, very important jobs will not get done. Our society needs manual laborers to keep everything from falling apart.
I make 120k a year installing carpets lol. I absolutely bust my ass but I make more than many people I know who went to college. My dad also installed carpets for 48 years before retiring at 71. I plan to retire sooner though lol but will work for many years to come and pump.up that IRA
Holy wow, where are you located if you don’t mind me asking? My dad lays carpet and makes like 35k a year.
Does your dad work for himself or someone else? If he works for himself I don’t know how he’s only making 35k lol. I live in Western New York though (no where near NYC)
Works for himself. But we live in Iowa so it isn’t quite as bad of a salary as it sounds. Still not great though
How the fuck did his knees last that long. Are they original equipment?
We don’t use kickers much any more we use power stretchers so the wear on the knees is not that bad. Our backs hands and shoulders hurt more than our knees.
Ahh. My dad was briefly in the trade in the 70s/80s and still has the tools (kicker included) from the era.
Watched him install a carpet once as a kid (as DIY, not a job…he had long moved on since then) and I couldn’t believe people could put that much trauma on their knees day in/day out for decades. Then a few years ago he installed another and just decided to rent the damn power stretcher. World of difference, he said.
Also, the jobs that pay decently will start to not pay decently. And now we’re back at square one
Actually worse than square one, because in this scenario, nobody’s picking up the trash.
That is a misnomer solution telling everyone to learn how to do the same thing like to learn to code as it then creates its own market issue of too much supply for need.
Additionally it’s not diverse. Diverse jobs are still needed. They need to just pay more in those jobs. But all this is besides the point anyways.
There is no house shortage. There is plenty to house people and the issue is with capitalism being unchecked for too long over its control on living arrangements. This is something capitalism shouldn’t have a say in. Society has become beyond its required need for helping people survive as a whole and it’s become unsustainable. It was never supposed to be about sustaining a rich person’s yacht and 5th house that has nobody living in it anyways. This is not a society that is thriving.
Exactly, banning or severely limiting short-term rental housing ie VRBO and foreign land/property purchases Id wager would make a huge impact on righting the boat.
Not really, then local landlords just make more profit because the demand is the same
Without the supply of homes going into shortterm rentals like VRBO it would increase supply for people who actually live in that city, travelers can use hotels. Not a full stop fix, but it would increase supply/lower rent.
That would increase hotel prices, making hotel owners purchase more land and build hotels until the equilibrium price is reached
It’s a short term fix that eventually loses to market forces
Even if it ends in more hotels, hotels fit more people and supply more jobs than the equivalent space in houses. For temporary lodging houses don’t make sense.
Naw, naw, it’s cool… see, surely their income went up 30% in 5 years, right?.. Right?
But we matched inflation last year! That means everything’s okay now doesn’t it? The inflation from previous years just goes away!
We beat inflation
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
Check the constant dollar column, all positive
You should really read your sources. The chart is not inflation adjusted. The report tells you the 12 month inflation adjusted figure.
Inflation-adjusted wages and salaries increased 0.8 percent for the 12 months ending March 2024.
Oh yeah we beat the pants off inflation! Whew baby! Oh by the way, there’s still the preceding years of wild fucking inflation to make back. As well as the decades of stagnant wages versus inflation.
I did read my sources, because when I said we beat inflation, that’s what my source says
Decades of stagnant wages
Good news, we had more than a decade of growing wages (the COVID spike is due to compositional effects)
A. You don’t know how medians work. In a set of [1,1,1,1,5,8,9,9,9] 5 is the median. But you wouldn’t say that’s representative of the average worker. You’re looking for the mode. Which would be 1 in that data set.
B. .8 percent is not the hot news you’re looking for.
5 is more representative than the mode, since it does show that about half make more and half made less
1 is ignoring the rest of the data completely
If this was a representative sample the ones would have rebelled already. This is a teaching example.
It did, actually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q
951 to 1136, Q1 2020 to Q1 2024.
+19.45% from Q1 2020, which doesn’t help you if rent is +30% and inflation in general hit +9%.
Q1 2019 was 899, so +26%, a little closer.
But the REAL problem is workers don’t see that gain unless they change jobs. Working the same job year after year you’re lucky to get 4% per year.
+19.45% from Q1 2020, which doesn’t help you if rent is +30% and inflation in general hit +9%.
Which means workers are making more overall. You don’t pay just rent, but a complete basket of goods. If wages are up 19% while the basket of goods is up 9%, then workers have more money in their pocket.
There will often be some individual thing that sticks out in the basket. If not rent, then maybe food. If not food, then maybe energy. That can tell us where to focus policy to reduce inflation. It doesn’t tell us that workers make less money in real terms.
But the REAL problem is workers don’t see that gain unless they change jobs. Working the same job year after year you’re lucky to get 4% per year.
This is a big problem. Companies do not value loyalty.
The rent for the fanciest apartment I’ve ever lived in (and ever will) was a little under 10k a year. New building, top floor, massive bathroom with sauna, a big balcony, a storage unit and a covered parking slot for my car all included. Oh and a lake view.
How long ago?
About 7 years ago. I bought a house since and my mortage is way less than that now.
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Nah. A mid-size city in Finland
I want to throw up. Rent at the shittiest, drug user filled, mushroom growing out of your shower ceiling, tiny bathroom, kitchen almost non existent, 1 bedroom, view of the apartment across the “courtyard” in my city is more than 10k a year (and that was several years ago). USA
I’m paying $5500 a year for a normal (about 80 m2) one bedroom appartment 10 minutes walk away from the center of a mid-sized Portuguese city about 150km from the capital Lisbon (granted, commuting to Lisbon would be about 1h 40m each way, but that’s something I don’t have to do).
I’ve chosen to not even own a car because I can actually make that choice here and 15m walking commute to the Coworking space from were I work is actually important for my health (it’s not really poluted around here, certainly less than Lisbon and way less than London)
It would be about 3x as much in the outskirts of Lisbon with a commute to Lisbon city center of about 30 - 45 minutes.
And Portugal actually has a house price bubble (the same place would’ve been about $3200 a decade ago), though it’s especially bad around the two major cities and the touristic area on the southern coast.
There’s apparently quite a number of Americans moving over here and working remotelly thanks to the country having a Digital Worker Visa system.
I’ve actually lived in Amsterdam, London and Berlin and whilst the first two are very expensive (London is just silly), Berlin was actually not (about $10k for an unfurnished one bedroom appartment about 5 years ago) and it’s quite a nice place to live, though for those like me who are self-employed, to that adds the mandatory health insurance in Germany which about $400 per month. Oh, and you can also chose not to own a car over there because it’s cycling friendly, has great public transportation and there are also some pretty good car rental schemes.
Uffda. My better half and I are living in apartments that are priced for college students and it’s still over $10k a year. None of that fancy shit. We have shared laundry machines but that’s about it.
