Affordable Housing: Part II

The income problem.

If you make enough money, paying for a place to live is no problem at all. Let’s examine the issue of affordable housing through the lens of income.

How much is enough? Depends on where you live.

If you lived elsewhere in the United States, about $65,000 per year would be considered good money. Here in Honolulu, you would be considered ‘low income’. You can view data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (specific to Hawaii) to see what kinds of jobs make that kind of money.

This number up above matters because that’s around the means to afford a place of your own. To be able to afford rent of $1,640 (HUD FY2020 FMR) without spending more than 30% of your income, you’ll need to earn that number from the last paragraph. It comes to about $31.79 per hour.

Now, there are a lot of jobs that are crucial to our society that don’t pay that kind of money. Using the BLS data, here’s a few examples:

  • Postal Service Mail Carriers (mean wage $26.13)

  • Firefighters (mean wage $30.82)

  • Wastewater treatment plant operators (mean wage $26.94)

  • Bus drivers (mean wage $21.60)

Most reasonable people would likely agree that we need all four of these groups, who perform important work to our society. Yet, a bus driver who helps hundreds of people get where they need to go is looking at paying about 44% of what they earn just to have a one-bedroom apartment.

Some jobs are not as visible or memorable, but remain important:

  • Phlebotomists, who draw blood for tests (mean wage $19.52)

  • Cashiers (mean wage $13.40)

  • Janitors (mean wage $16.19)

  • Medical Assistants (mean wage $19.05)

Please remember that rent comes to $19,680 each year, for a one-bedroom apartment. None of the jobs on this list so far are able to make rent easily. If any of these people have a family, and require a larger apartment, their problems magnify substantially.

The minimum wage in the State of Hawaii is $10.10 as of 2020. As you might imagine, life would be even more difficult for someone earning only this amount of money. Their annual income would be around $20,684.

There are a number of people who live at the edge of their means, because their wages are not enough to cover the cost of living.

Next, we consider the barriers of housing prices in Part 3.

 

Your new home awaits.