From the National Low Income Housing Coalitions 2015 report: In no state can an individual working a typical 40-hour workweek at the federal minimum wage afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment for his or her family.
From the 'Out of Reach' report: "In no state can an individual working a typical 40-hour workweek at the federal minimum wage afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment for his or her family." NLIHC

The gap between wages and rents is an uncomfortably familiar source of constant, low-level panic for many Americans, but the National Low Income Housing Coalition recently measured exactly how wide that gap is in its annual Out of Reach report.

NLIHC has published the ominously-titled study every year for the past 26 years. It crunches federal data from the Census Bureau, Social Security, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies. "The study consistently shows the same thing, only worse every year," says Sheila Crowley, the organization's president and CEO. "The cost of housing continues to outstretch incomes at the lower end."

Washington State ranks 10th worst in the triangulation between rents and wages, requiring an average $21.69 hourly wage at a 40-hour/week job—$45,119 per year—to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair-market rate. (In this case, "afford" means spending no more than 30 percent of your wages on rent.) To afford a two-bedroom in King County, you'd need to make $27.21 per hour, or $56,595 a year.

Despite localized minimum-wage increases in states like Washington and Oregon, Crowley says "there is still no place in the country where you can work full-time on prevailing minimum wage and afford to rent a modest home—by the standard of not paying more than 30 percent of your income."

Download the full .pdf of the "Out of Reach" report and swim around in the depressing data.

The study was funded in part by JPMorgan Chase—which agreed to a record $13 billion settlement with the US government for its "alleged bad behavior relating to mortgages and mortgage-backed bonds" that many believe was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis.

Some of that settlement money was set aside to alleviate housing crises across the country, but Crowley says that's not the pot of money NLIHC's support comes from. "We enjoy the support of all the major banks and have for many years," she says. "Their charitable wings support various housing advocacy efforts and we greatly appreciate that—it also has to be clear that they have no influence over our policy decisions."

Out of Reach, she says, is the only annual research publication that analyzes rental costs for low-income people in every jurisdiction of the United States.

The report is put together for policymakers and advocates, but also for regular folks wondering why they're being pushed farther and farther from their old communities and workplaces.

"It can't help them get housing," Crowley says, "but it can at least help them understand why they can't find it: 'It's not just my problem; it's a structural problem.'"

So, on a local note, when it comes to Seattle and Capitol Hill—yes, public transit is a social-justice issue. But the fight for efficient and serious mass transit, which advocates in Seattle have been losing for decades (with the exception-that-proves-the-rule of light rail), is a necessary but not nearly sufficient or timely answer to our current problems.

It's not a question of whether we grow, but how we manage that growth, that will determine what kind of city we'll be living in 5 to 10 years from now.

"It’s not hard to figure out that we have stagnating and falling wages at the lowest end of income, but we have demand for rental housing that’s increasing because there’s more renters than there used to be," Crowley says. "Demand has been at the high end, not the low end. We’ve been losing housing at the low end."