Dennis RomeroThe bad news about L.A.'s housing crisis just keeps coming. Real estate website Zillow recently looked at the minimum income required to rent an average home in several major U.S. cities.
As you can imagine, the numbers for Los Angeles are staggering. It would take an annual household income of $97,160 just to get the keys to a median-priced rental home in this market, Zillow says. Keep in mind that this kind of income would nearly put you in the top one-fifth of income earners in the country.
In L.A, however, it would get you a smack-dab-in-the-middle, $2,429-a-month home.
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Zillow's median-rent calculations skew toward single-family homes, its representatives have told us in the past. So this doesn't necessarily apply to average apartments, which tend to run about $1,000 or so less.
Still, it's a sobering figure.
Put another way, Zillow says, each person in a two-earner family in L.A. would have to make $24.50 an hour, 40 hours a week, in order to afford the rent on a median home in this market.
Of 10 major cities Zillow highlighted, that $49 an hour of work made us the number three least-affordable place for this kind of housing.
L.A. was beat out by number one San Francisco (which requires a whopping $79 an hour) and number two Boston ($50). A median New York home requires $44 an hour.
Credit: Zillow
Within Los Angeles, the extremes were represented by Littlerock, near Palmdale, which required $27 an hour to rent a house, and Hidden Hills, near Calabasas, which would require $184 an hour in income.
Zillow looked at dozens of communities in the market, and the reading is weep-worthy. Even in places like Hawaiian Gardens ($72,360), Compton ($73,480) and Pico Rivera ($80,760), the household annual income required to get a house is astonishing.
The median household income in Los Angeles is $55,909. The per capital individual income is $27,749.
Living in L.A. is officially impossible.
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