1-br Affordability Requires 3 Minimum Wage Earners in Houston

Houston’s rental market isn’t cooling down as quickly as the broader housing market.

It takes the income of three full-time minimum wage workers, on average, to afford a standard one-bedroom rental in the Bayou City, the Houston Chronicle reported, based on a report by Zillow. Its study compared local minimum wage increases to rent hikes in the 50 largest cities in the United States.

“It’s been a struggle and a challenge for a minimum wage workers in Houston for some time, but we can definitely see that as rents have gone up so much over the pandemic, that it’s definitely getting more challenging over the course of time,” Nicole Bachaud, senior economist at Zillow, told the outlet.

Rent for the average one-bedroom apartment in Houston costs $1,050 a month. A rule of housing affordability says no more than 30 percent of a resident’s income should be used to pay for housing. Rent for a two-bedroom apartment priced at the average $1,265 a month would take 3.6 full-time minimum-wage incomes.

The federal and state minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 an hour for the past 15 years, even though the cost of rent has increased rapidly. In 2018, a one-bedroom apartment required the income of two-and-a-half full-time minimum-wage jobs. The same apartment requires about 80 hours more work per month now.

In metros where the minimum wage is in line with the federal rate, minimum wage workers struggled more with rent affordability and housing security than the markets that have higher minimum wages, Zillow’s study found.

For example, in San Francisco, where rents are notoriously high but the minimum wage is $16.99 per hour, it would take 2.9 minimum wage workers to afford a one-bedroom apartment, or about 16 hours less work per month than in Houston.

— Victoria Pruitt