Ohio rent costs pinch working class families

A housing advocacy group released findings this week which show Ohioans on average must earn $12.31 an hour to afford rent for a two-bedroom apartment.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual Out of Reach study concludes that even when Ohio's hourly minimum wage hikes to $6.85 in January, many Ohioans will still find themselves struggling to pay rent, particularly single residents living alone and families dependent on one wage-earner.

According to the study, the average Ohio renter makes $10.81 an hour. At that wage, a renter would have to work 46 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, in order to afford the state's average, fair market-priced, two-bedroom apartment which was calculated at $640 a month.

That's not entirely un-doable, but what about Ohioans making less than the average renter's $10.81 hourly wage?

The study found that based on Ohio's current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour a renter would have to work 96 hours a week, year-round, to afford the same two-bedroom apartment. Or, a household must include 2.4 minimum wage earners working 40 hours per week in order to make the average two-bedroom apartment affordable.

Locally, 32 percent of Toledo metropolitan area residents rent their homes and the estimated mean hourly wage for Toledo renters is $9.97.

The study concluded that Toledo area hourly wages needed to afford local fair-market rent costs are $8.42 for a studio or efficiency apartment, fair-market priced at $438 a month; $9.37 for a one-bedroom apartment, priced at $487 a month; $11.60 for a two-bedroom apartment, priced at $603 a month; and $14.96 for a three-bedroom apartment, priced at $778 a month.

Toledo's minimum-wage earners, then, even after the wage hike in January, will still find themselves unable to afford even a modest efficiency apartment.

Figures compiled for each of Ohio's counties are also available online at the coalition's Ohio study search page.

A search for Sandusky County data, for example, shows that 25 percent of the county's residents are renters and the minimum hourly wage needed to afford an average-priced one-bedroom apartment is $9.19.

In Wood County, where 29 percent of the county's residents are renters, the hourly wage required to afford an average-priced one-bedroom apartment is $9.37.

The study based its calculations on the generally accepted rule of thumb which states that "affordable housing" should make up no more than 30 percent of a wage earner's income. Data from the United States Census Bureau, HUD and the Consumer Price Index contributed to the coalition's findings.

The Cincinnati Enquirer published a story on the findings yesterday and quoted the coalition's president Sheila Crowley as stating that even a federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour, as proposed by Democrats, would still leave millions of minimum-wage earners across the nation struggling to afford housing.

Crowley told the Enquirer that Americans who spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing have to cut costs on basic needs like food and child care to make ends meet.

"You have to juggle," she said. "You have to make adjustments -- none of them good."