copperbadge:

fatanarchy:

Good luck affording a place to live. Forget being able to fucking eat “healthy” like you’re “supposed to” (aka, morally obligated to).

I think it’s important to note that this is “Without paying more than 30% of their income”. The idea that you should not pay more than 30% of your income is a long-held “truism” in real estate/city planning, but it’s essentially low-ball bunk. It began with the National Housing Act of 1937, which limited income for those applying for public housing — ie, if you were in subsidized housing, you should be paying 30% of your income and no less. 30% of your income is what you were meant to pay if you were poor and receiving government aid, to make sure nobody took advantage of the public housing system. 

30% is basically a made up figure. It’s not really based on any math, and in most urban and some suburban areas it’s absolutely irrelevant. Many urbanites routinely pay 50% of their income to housing, if not more, because the vast majority of urbanites are paying for access to things like public transit and services nearby — in other words, things you need to access if you can’t afford a car. Suburbanites, who generally have to be able to afford cars, may still pay more than 30% because of the “benefit” of living in the suburbs. 

So these hours are the bare minimum someone would need to work to pay a mythic figure that is almost definitely, anywhere outside of fairly rural America, far too low.