To afford a two-bedroom apartment in the state of Louisiana, you need to make a wage of $16.63 an hour, according to new figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, where 41% of residents rent, it takes even higher wages to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment. You’d need to make at least $17.42, which is more than double minimum wage and higher than the $31,669 average annual household income of renters in the area.
The coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report shows just how expensive it is to live in a modest apartment, broken down by state and ZIP code. The report takes into account only average incomes and rental rates. In Baton Rouge, some zip codes have far lower rents and household incomes than others.
However, there’s not a single state in which someone working 40 hours a week at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment without having some roommates who also pay rent.
The “Out of Reach” report calculates these results by comparing the “gap between wages and the cost of rental housing across the United States.”
