Nation’s top three most expensive places for renters: all in Bay Area

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

If you want to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the South Bay, you’d better make close to $50 an hour — or roughly $100,000 a year — according to a startling new report that pegs all three of the nation’s most expensive regions for renters squarely within the Bay Area.

It’s even worse in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, where workers need to net $60 an hour, or about $125,000. In the East Bay, it’s $45 an hour, or $93,000 a year, according to the “Out of Reach” study released Wednesday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The new numbers highlight the dire situation that confronts many local workers as they’re forced to cram into small, overcrowded apartments or commute long distances from cheaper neighborhoods in the Central Valley and beyond.

“Even if you have two or three minimum-wage jobs, you’re still not going to be able to make ends meet,” said Tom Myers, executive director of Mountain View-based nonprofit Community Services Agency. “That’s why we’re seeing an increase in homelessness, that’s why we’re seeing an increase in people living in their vehicles and an increase in people coming to us for services.”

In San Jose, where the minimum wage is $13.50 an hour, workers would have to hold down 3.6 full-time, minimum-wage jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment. When the city’s minimum salary increases to $15 next year, workers will need 3.2 jobs.

It’s not just the Bay Area where rents are out of reach for low-income earners. There is no state, metropolitan area or county in the U.S. where workers earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom rental home by working 40 hours a week, according to the study. But the San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland metro areas rank as the first, second and third most expensive regions in the country, respectively. Honolulu is number four, and the Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut area is number five.

If California only cared about increasing the supply of housing.....