Rent Burden in Northwest Oregon
December 11, 2024Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS) recently released a report on the State of the State’s Housing. Inside are 52 pages of critical information covering the state of housing and rental markets, as well as housing challenges and homelessness across the state. While the entire report is worth a read, the focus of this article is on presenting one graph from the report using data exclusively for Northwest Oregon.
Housing affordability is a primary concern for many workers. Finding a job or career path that can afford someone the ability to have shelter is one of the basic tenets of survival. When discussing housing affordability, it’s frequently considered that housing is affordable if that housing costs 30% or less of a person’s income. If someone is spending more than 30% of their income on rent, they are considered rent burdened. That additional expenditure on rent eats into the amount of money that individuals have to spend on other necessary goods, such as food, healthcare, and transportation costs. Using rental price data on one-bedroom apartments in Oregon from Apartment List, the OHCS report identifies that an annual wage of $50,166 is needed to not be rent burdened by the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment ($1,254).
When we look at how that wage compares with projected occupational openings, only two of the 20 occupations expected to hire the most workers between 2022 and 2032 in Northwest Oregon pay a wage that would allow a worker to afford a one-bedroom apartment without being rent burdened.
There are a few caveats to unpack with this data. First is that we are looking at average wages and rents. For example, there are some waiters and waitresses who earn more than $50,166. However, when we look at the wages of all waiters and waitresses in Northwest Oregon, the average wage of those workers is below that threshold of affordability. The next caveat is examining exactly what we mean when we say that these occupations are expected to hire the most workers between 2022 and 2032. That data is calculated by looking at new job openings that are expected to be added over that ten-year period as well as replacement openings. Replacement openings occur when someone who is employed in one occupation switches to another occupation. For example, if a fast food worker was promoted to a first-line supervisor of food preparation workers, a job opening to replace that person as a fast food worker would occur. Many of the occupations on the left side of the graph are occupations that are expected to have a large number of replacement openings. In fact, some of these occupations are expected to decline in overall employment over the ten-year period while still hiring large amounts of workers due to replacement openings, like retail salespersons. Finally, it is very common for low-wage jobs to also have a large amount of replacement openings. These occupations, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, are often filled by individuals entering or reentering the labor market, and frequently have minimal education and experience requirements.
That said, when assessing housing affordability for renters, many of the occupations expected to hire the most people in Northwest Oregon between 2022 and 2032 pay wages that are below the threshold for housing affordability when looking at the one-bedroom rental market.