CHARLOTTE — Forget about sleep — paying rent in increasingly expensive Charlotte would require a worker making minimum wage to stay on the clock around the clock, according to a new report that examines wages and housing costs.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report determined that a person earning the federal minimum wage — $7.25 per hour — in Charlotte would need to work 100-plus hours per week to afford even a studio apartment or one-bedroom home. For a two-bedroom unit at what it calls “fair market rent,” pegged at $1,151 in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro, that requirement jumps to 122 hours a week.
Anyone crunching those numbers will quickly note that’s impossible with a five-day workweek — it would come out to about 24.4 hours per day. Even working seven days a week, a person would have to put in 17.4 hours each day.
Read more here.
(EXPLAINER: How NC is distributing $1.3B in rental aid)
©2021 Cox Media Group
