Los Angeles has already taken its place at the top of the ranks of cities where it sucks to be a renter, but it's only rough if you don't bring home a hefty paycheck, says a new survey from personal finance site SmartAsset. Using the 30 percent metric (the rule of thumb that says that no more than 30 percent of income should go toward housing, including utilities and rent, and that any more makes rent unaffordable and burdensome), SmartAsset calculated what a household would need to make to meet that requirement, spending 28 percent of their income on rent alone (with 2 percent left over for other for utilities and related expenses).
SmartAsset looked at the average cost for an available, market-rate, two-bedroom rental, and what they found was that the average rental in that category cost $3,398 a month. With a pricetag like that, the average household would have to bring in $145,629 annually to pay the rent.
As if that weren't hard enough to hear, market rate rents in Los Angeles are 17.1 percent higher than they were last year. "None of the other cities in our study saw market rents rise by quite that much," says the site.
The site compiles data on market rents from listings site MyApartmentMap.com, "which keeps track of fair market rents for apartments nationwide." To decide the cities their survey would cover, SmartAsset looked at the nation's 300 largest cities, then narrowed it down to the big cities in the 15 largest metros.xxx
- The Income Needed to Pay Rent in the Largest U.S. Cities [SmartAsset]
- Los Angeles is Getting Even Less Affordable For Renters [Curbed LA]
- Here's How Much You Need to Make to Live 'Comfortably' in LA [Curbed LA]
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