Rent is Mathematically Impossible (Scripts and Sources)

Good morning, bad news: minimum wage workers can no longer afford rent in ANY state, city, or county in America. It’s over. A report just released from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that a full-time minimum wage worker mathematically cannot pay rent on an average two-bedroom apartment ANYWHERE in the US, and only in 7% of all US counties can they afford a one-bedroom apartment. Minimum wage has gone from being a living wage, to a starvation wage, and is now an extinction wage.

We’re gonna talk about the fact that the post-pandemic economic recovery is so bad for the working class that it’s causing an extinction event for the lower-income population, who are facing homelessness on a generational scale.

The minimum wage ranges from $7.25 in 21 states - up to $14 an hour in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the average market rate in the United States, you would have to make almost $25 an hour, or work 137 hours a week at federal minimum wage. And if you want a one-bedroom, you only have to work 112 hours a week, which is 22 and a half hours a day during the workweek, leaving you with an hour and a half every day to sleep, eat, bathe, and of course, commute to work. But hey, that’s the grind, right?

Well, not for everyone. Did you know that for the wealthy, rent is actually going down? In fact, the more money you make, the lower your rent has gotten in the last year. Seriously. The COVID-19 recovery has been referred to as a “K” shape, which means that if you are an upper-income earner, your wages and net worth have gone up in the last year, while your rent has gone down. Meanwhile, if you are a lower-wage worker, not even necessarily minimum wage, just lower, your rent has invariably gone up, while you almost certainly make less money than you did pre-pandemic, and you’re also more likely to be unemployed now.

And the reasons for this are outrageous. Simply put, the one-sided economic response to the pandemic geared towards boosting the stock market at the expense of the working class, pushed so many people out of the middle class and into poverty, that the supply and demand for lower-cost housing is now at an all-time high, which is driving up it’s price. Simultaneously, high-income earners who can work-from-home, are gentrifying lower-income communities at an unprecedented rate. Now that they don’t have to live in high-priced metropolitan areas for work, they’re buying property and displacing renters in lower-income communities around the country. And there was already a huge shortage of affordable units pre-pandemic, now it’s gone from being a shortage, to a housing crisis because those units are being renovated and upsold at 2-3x times their price.

And ironically, because the wealthy are moving out of high-income areas, the cost of rent in those areas is going down, so those who were able to afford high rent to begin with, and stayed, are now paying less than they ever did. Some outrageously expensive real estate markets like Manhattan, saw the lowest rents in a decade. And of course nobody can buy a house anymore, that’s not even on the table for the upper-middle class at this point.

So what we’re seeing is that not only are the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor (as always), but the poor are now SO POOR, and there are now SO MANY of them, that the only thing currently preventing a huge portion of the country from falling into mass starvation and homelessness is the eviction moratorium and the extended unemployment benefits - and those WILL be gone soon. So, what happens next?