MIAMI – For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.
The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent – not including utilities – was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.
In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.
Nationally, half of all renters now are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000. In December, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan declared “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”
One of the most expensive cities for renters is Miami, where rents, on average, consume 43 percent of the typical household income, up from a historical average of just more than a quarter.
Stella Santamaria, a divorced 40-year-old math teacher, has been looking for an apartment in Miami for more than six months.
“We’re kind of sick of talking about it,” she said of herself and fellow teachers in the same boat.
After 11 years as a teacher, Santamaria makes $41,000, considerably less than the city’s median income, which is $48,000, according to Zillow.
Even dual-income professional couples are being priced out of the walkable urban-core neighborhoods where many of them want to live. Stuart Kennedy, 29, a senior program officer at a nonprofit group, said he and his girlfriend, a lawyer, will be losing their $2,300-a-month rental house in Buena Vista in June. Since they found the place a year ago, rents in the area have increased sharply.
“If you go by a third of your income, that formula, even with how comfortable our incomes are, it looks like it’s going to be impossible,” Kennedy said.
