Thursday, January 5, 2017

Many Oregon Workers in High Demand Jobs Need to Work Long Hours/Two Jobs to Afford the Rent.

Building on my prior post HERE, I have constructed a new Excel worksheet HERE (and embedded below) that allows the user to select any combination of Oregon counties and 100 high demand occupations to see whether the 2016 statewide median wage for that occupation is sufficient to pay for the HUD 1 or 2 bedroom FMR at the county level.  

The last two rows of the worksheet show how many hours a full time median income worker would have to work to make the HUD 1 BR and 2 BR FMR affordable (with the wage earner paying 30% of their income for rent). 

The default setting shows in order from right to left the top 6 occupations with the highest # of annual openings and uses  Clackamas county (Portland metro) for rent comparisons.  [You can change the counties and occupations to meet your needs, but likely will have to download the file to do so]. 

The table shows that in the Portland metro area the median full time wage for 5 of the 6 highest demand jobs is NOT enough to make the HUD 1 AND 2 Bedroom Fair Market rent affordable. 

To make rent affordable for these 5 high demand occupations I calculate that the Portland metro median wage worker would have to work between 70 and 83 hours a week to make the 1 BR FMR affordable and between 83 and 98 hours a week for make the 2 BR FMR affordable. 


Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog

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