Minimum Wage Not Enough to Afford 2-Bedroom Rent Anywhere in The U.S., Study Finds

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Friday, June 15, 2018

The federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 dollars an hour simply does not add up to much over the month, and a new report shows exactly why in stark terms.

According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is nowhere in the entire country that the minimum wage can realistically afford the rent of a modest two-bedroom apartment.

The new study by the NLIHC is a vivid picture of the way the high cost of rent throughout pretty much the entire United States have gone well out of reach for minimum income earners. According to their numbers, workers on average would need to earn around $22 per hour just to be able to afford to rent a "modest" two-bedroom place.

That's around three times the minimum wage, as CNN pointed out. To put it another way, minimum wage workers will have to work thrice as hard just so that they would be able to live in a home with two beds. That means working 122 hours a week or a grueling 17 hours per day with no weekend breaks, in the extremely unlikely case that the employer would even allow them.

Cutting it down to a one-bedroom apartment does not help the matter much, either. On average, workers in the U.S. will still need to earn around $18 an hour to rent a home with one bed. For minimum wage earners, that means working 99 hours per week, every week for the entire year just to keep the roof over their heads.

"In the richest country in history, no family should have to make the awful choice between putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads," Sen. Bernie Sanders, who called for an increase of the minimum wage to $15 an hour, wrote about the matter.