Wage Needed to Rent 2 Bedroom Unit in Each State

a reply to: ketsuko

Yeah, inflation. Here are some threads I made on ATS about that.

Almost Half of US Households Exhaust Their Salaries

Historic value of U.S. copper and silver coins

A copper penny saved

Have a gander at those topics.

a reply to: alishainwonderland

Hello fellow Coloradoan

I hear the same commercials and although 11 an hour is a dollar more than I make now, I don't have to commute an hour to get to work. $11 is better than 10 but still not a living wage. No adult can live on that especially by themselves. If you look at the map Colorado is 15th in the nation now compared to our neighbor to the North and South which is 31st and 32nd . I like Colorado but there's Mountains in other states which are much cheaper.

originally posted by: InfinityandBeyond
This is the 4th apartment I've rented in this city. The first landlord was rich, and could care less about the apartment. Took him 3 months after the initial request to fix the leaking roof that destroyed our furniture, he's even a contractor for a primary job!

The 2nd apartment was owned by a lady who also owns a paper copy business. They were really professional and handled complaints very quickly. Very lenient when money got short.

It's a hit and miss really. I'm sure it's difficult maintaining a property when you rent out to scumbags, but when you get good people in to your home you should take care of them. My current landlord (company) said I could renovate and they would reimburse everything, which so far they have done. Gets me outside, and I'm learning home maintenance preparing myself for a future home.

I know someone who has a contractor as a landlord and has the same problems. They redid the bathroom and did a horrible job of doing so and it doesn't drain properly. You'd think a contractor would be more on top of his rentals.

Anyway I think these days the only way to be able to buy a home would be to do a rent to own. Too bad they couldn't let you own the place you fixed up. All that work is worth something!

a reply to: ketsuko

Inflation is definitely part of it. Everything is getting more expensive while wages are remaining flat. The only thing that has gone down is gasoline which has been a godsend but probably wont last long.

I wonder what the real rate of inflation is? It's certainly not 2.whatever percent the Government says.

There was just a big stink here in Atlanta about how private equity firms - some of the same ones that tanked the economy in 2009 - are buying up all of the rental property and jacking up rents.

People whose families were screwed when their houses went underwater are reluctant to buy as well as younger people or people who had to foreclose. So these equity firms see a new cash cow in the growing rental market and have started screwing people all over again.

It's positively parasitic.

a reply to: kosmicjack

Yikes that's not good, but it doesn't surprise me. Gotta prop up the real estate market and make everyone believe that times are really good and the market is going no where but up. I imagine when the bubble starts to pop we'll have the same result as last time, the rich getting richer while more middle and lower class people get shafted.

a reply to: asmall89

What's happening here is that people are being evicted because they can't pay the higher rents after the properties are sold to the equity firms. Apparently some federal law preventing evictions from foreclosed rental homes has just expired. Since January, most home sales in this area have been to equity firms. Kinda creepy when you think about it....what are those implications, long term, for the economy?

a reply to: kosmicjack

It is creepy! It makes you wonder why they are doing it. Is it just for the sake of profit, or is there something larger in mind?

My question is where are all these people supposed to go when they get evicted? Some probably have family they can go back too but for the rest there's what? With all these people homeless there could be some big problems in the future as far as civil unrest.

a reply to: asmall89

if people are willing to work then they should be able to afford food, water and shelter and the ability to keep themselves healthy.

You said it better than I could. The thing is, a lot of the jobs that exist these days don't pay enough to live on. And the corporations know this, but they provide the jobs anyways. They also ship any kind of meaningful job overseas.

A factory worker used to be able to afford a house, a car, and to take care of a family of four without the wife even working. That job archetype has been replaced by the service industry, which doesn't pay a living wage.

Companies are fully aware of and expecting their jobs to be taken by men and women that are adults and raising families, but don't do anything to facilitate this.

a reply to: darkbake
the companies are expecting the gov't (the taxpayers) to supplement the families income...
of course the same companies then bulk about their taxes and beg for tax cuts and tax breaks...
and it just hasn't dawned on these companies yet that the more people who are being put into this position the less people are putting into the tax pool that is paying for all this..
they probably don't care as long as their balance sheets show nice big profits that will give them nice big bonuses!!!

when the rents are hiked up like that well the next thing that will happen is the gov't will step in and increase the proverty line so that more will be eligible for the gov't assistance. again they are counting on those gov't programs to step in and pay what the economy cannot support the proper way- through employment!
it's a crappy cycle that has been playing out really for quite some time but sooner or later it's gonna have to end because you can't have an overwhelming majority of the people relying on these programs while there's very few putting into the pool to pay for it while the companies dodge the cost of the system
then it all comes tumbling down and the big wigs in the companies come join us on the bottom!!! hope they don't expect any sympathy from me when that happens because I've about run out and am reserving what I have left for only a select few special people in my life.

a reply to: kosmicjack

Happening here in Denver. They're also finding ways to evict long term renters so they can rent at the higher (crazy high here) rates. People who have lived in Denver forever can no longer afford it and are being forced out of what has always been their home

So it goes

Here in Vancouver there is an alarming number of units sutting empty that were investment purchases from overseas buyers. Unfortunately our mayor is sleeping with a 20yr old chinese pop star so I dont see any regulation coming in any time soon.

Most new listings get posted in Shanghi at least a few weeks before we see them here because most of the real estate agents are foreign loyalists that are hell bent on taking over Canadas west coast and pricing anyone who does not have at least 3 generations living together out of the market.

Canadas west coast is under attack.

originally posted by: asmall89
a reply to: ketsuko

Exactly, if you're fortunate enough to have enough to put 10 to 20 percent down for a house then your payments would probably end up being less, plus you build equity. But rent is sucking people dry, that combined with the new part time economy buying a house is just unrealistic for most people.

It is to bad there is not a lending procedure that loans the down into the cost of the home. You would still have to qualify of course by having the required income.

We paid $5000.00 down on a three bedroom with 1 acre, for $100.000 very underpriced by seller. Monthly payment with tax and insurance is 750.00. Rent in our area is 1200 plus hard to find anything near 700-800 a month.

There is no way for young people to get started on the wages here and yet the catch 22, if wages were raised the struggling businesses here would all collapse except Walmart!

a reply to: Char-Lee

There used to be, and people called them predatory lenders and still do. A lot of people who got homes in that way are the same ones who lost their homes because they either got stupid packages like ARM loans or interest only loans or they were trying to flip homes (like Senator Warren who had enough to not lose it all ...).

Now enough responsible institutions got burned and are being watchdogged that they won't loan without that 20% down.

The 3-bedroom, 1.5 bath, postage-stamp-sized-front/back-yards house I lived in when I was around 16 was selling for $220,000 US a few years later and this was way back in the mid-80s. This was a California boom era, which eventually busted. Minimum wage there and then was something like $3.35 as I fuzzily recall.

When I was old enough to start being aware of such things, there was no possible way I could ever expect to own a home. Although it contributed to making me a workaholic -- I left a nearly-free junior college because working 80 hours a week plus school had shelved sleep as unworkable and eventually my body quit making it optional -- but that was merely my own pathology; I think it contributed to crime on a larger scale, from people I knew who felt they had nothing to lose.

Around 2000 my parents bought a home that was about the same as that one, in NE Oklahoma, in a decent little city for $39,000 US. Of course, most of the jobs are fast food, WalMart, or medical in some way. Then again, honestly they weren't much better in southern coastal CA except that there was a wider variety and generally more of them there. The pay wasn't all that much better.

Most people I know had kids accidentally. They moved in with someone because they couldn't afford to live alone.

While we're griping about cost of living I'd just like to mention that in Vancouver BC or Seattle or I assume parts of NY you could take public transit to a job. Where I lived in CA and where I live now in OK that is not an option, so you have to own a working car, with all its expenses and insurance etc. That can make a real difference when income is minimal. And it can make a real difference in the ability to find and work a job that pays a little more.

I live in a small mill city in SW WA and I'll be damned if i'm going to pay $800-$1200 a month for a house that is smaller than my apartment!! Sure, there might be houses available for around the same price I pay for my apartment, but they are so run down and in the worst neighborhoods I would be a fool to even consider it. Oh sure,,it's a house, with maybe a little yard and if your lucky, a garage, but the noise from the neighbors that live there, and the constant crime that goes on makes me feel sick to even think about it.
Take my sister and her husbands place for example. Relatively nice neighborhood except for the Latinos next door that constantly make mass noise and have there kids screaming allll day long. The noisy little mutt a few houses down that yaps like there's no tomorrow, and the fact that her husband has had to spend a lot of money fixing certain issues with the house, I don't know how the put up with it. No, I'm just fine here in my huge apartment in a luckily quiet area.

a reply to: LDragonFire

"Housing assistance" is being run as nothing but a subsidy for property management companies. Where I'm from you can't find a studio and a one bedroom isn't much more common, and you're starting out at 650/month for a one bedroom and 800 for a two bedroom- and that's if you want to live in the Mexican part of town where the police don't lift a finger until somebody reports gunfire and get robbed by somebody who has access to your landlord's key. I was working directly for millionaires, in contact with them, putting out literal and figurative fires on their behalf (and sometimes on their car or house or gardener's paint-thinner-soaked pants), taking beer and drugs out of their wrecked cars before photographing them... and I couldn't afford to have a peaceful space of my own when I got out of that mad house. I dramatically improved my life by moving to North Dakota and living in a camp site to work be a carpenter. THE CAMPGROUND COST 300 A MONTH!

It's good for the authorities of course to have unsteady cohabitation among the poor though. People living with people they can't trust, calling the police on each other, moving out on each other and creating a growing web of joint and several liabilities with each other for old debts and robbing eachother and having to buy new stuff and turning existing stuff back into commerce, lying on government forms to get into programs, exposing themselves at every turn to all kinds of legal and economic gotchas, and the story of how they've been deprived the fruits of their labor is so entwined with domestic drama that others and even themselves can easily say they were given a fair share and it got ruined by themselves or others instead of doing the math and realize they only ever received between a quarter and a half of what was obviously reasonable and were forced to fight over it.

It's quite the racket. We were promised an ownership society when I was in my early 20s, and I cheered and I joined the military to earn my place in it. Well, they own it. You want housing assistance? Give people HOUSES!

a reply to: DerekJR321

I just moved out of the Bay Area of California, also one of the most expensive areas...average rent in San Francisco is over $4,000/month, San Jose is around $2000/month for a decent apartment and most are around $3000 and I know lots of people that work 70 hours a week or work 3 or 4 jobs. My wife and I got lucky and found a low income slum 1bdrm apartment that was TINY and a dump, but in a decent area of San Jose and it went from $925 to $1200 in just a couple years, and after we left the apartment manager told us he was getting $1600 from all new tenants!!! In Sacramento now we are looking at $1000 to $1200 a month for a much cleaner, nicer, and safer apartment, but there aren't as many jobs up here...I had transferred but just lost my job yesterday

a reply to: asmall89

Apartments often are more expensive than a house here in Oklahoma, but a $1200 apartment would be a nice one, versus moving into an apartment that is older.

a reply to: darkbake

Yeah tell me about it, I currently work in the service sector and $10 is better than 7.25 but at part time is not enough to live off of. I don't know if it's harder to get FT employment because of the ACA or what but we're becoming a part time service sector economy.

Factory jobs still pay decent wages, definitely not a house, car, and house wife good. With what factory workers have to put up with they should pay more than that! I was looking into one that paid 16.80 and had 12.5 hour shifts however I heard that they fire people quite frequently over stupid things so I stuck with where I was at.