Freshman housing

I live like a freshman
I still have a roommate
We walk to the Laundry

— Jill Sobule, "Freshman"

The National Low Income Housing Coalition has released the 2004 version of their annual report "Out of Reach" and found that … drumroll please …

Poor people still can't afford to rent an apartment in America.

"Out of Reach" takes an idiosyncratic, maybe even gimmicky, approach to the topic of housing affordability. They take HUD data on the fair market cost of rental housing in every county of the United States, then calculate how many hours a week a person would have to work at a minimum-wage job in order to afford such a rent.

They also calculate what they call the "housing wage" for each state and county. The housing wage is the hourly pay you would need to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent. The lowest housing wages are in Puerto Rico ($7.22) and West Virginia ($9.31), demonstrating again that a minimum-wage employee can't actually afford to live in this country.

"Affordability" here uses the federal standard that housing costs should not exceed 30 percent of income. For an awful lot of Americans, that standard seems woefully out of date as we're paying 40 percent or even 50 percent of our income for housing. That disparity, of course, is part of the point that NLIHC is making.

A single person or a childless couple could opt to reduce the required housing wage by renting a slightly more affordable one-bedroom apartment. But even then, the housing wage exceeds what many Americans are making. Thus low-income people have two options. They can pay an unsustainably high share of income for housing (well above the 30 percent standard). Or they can get a roommate (or two, or more).

I put that Jill Sobule lyric up there at the top because her song "Freshman" captures something that is often overlooked about what it means in America to be a part of the renter-with-roommate class.

Most Americans closer to the top of the economic pyramid had a roommate back in college, and maybe for a few years after that. Sobule hints at the way this affects their view of others for whom this living arrangement is an ongoing, inescapable necessity — the way these others are viewed as somehow not quite adults. That adds insult to injury for people for whom — as the NLIHC demonstrates year after year with its report — affordable housing is "Out of Reach."