By Laird Harrison, KQED News Fix
How do you afford a studio apartment in San Francisco? Well, if you’re earning the minimum wage, you work 72 hours a week by the calculations of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
And that’s getting off easy. San Francisco has a higher minimum wage than the rest of the country, $10.55 an hour. If San Franciscans got paid the federal minimum wage, $7.25, they’d need to work 105 hours per week to rent that apartment, according to the coalition.
The coalition released its annual report on the nation’s increasingly tight rental market on Monday.
It rated California the second-most-expensive state for renters, after Hawaii. Overall, 3 out of the 10 most expensive metropolitan areas were in California, with San Francisco just behind Honolulu as the second most expensive. Orange County was the fourth most expensive, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara was the fifth, and Santa Cruz-Watsonville was the sixth.
Six out of the 10 most expensive counties were in California, the researchers found: San Mateo at No. 3, San Francisco at No. 4, Marin at No. 5, Orange County at No. 7, Santa Clara at No. 8, and Santa Cruz at No. 9.
Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.