Vital Jobs Priced Out of Housing

Teachers, police officers and nurses in the Southland don’t earn nearly enough to afford a median-priced home within reasonable distance of their jobs, according to a new report that underscores the difficulty that people working in five vital occupations have in finding suitable housing.

The study also found that retail salespeople and janitors here don’t make enough to rent even a one-bedroom apartment. And they’re not alone, according to “Paycheck to Paycheck,� which documents that having a job does not necessarily guarantee a family a decent place to live in most of the nation’s 60 largest housing markets.

“Households dependent on a teacher’s or police officer’s salary alone cannot afford to buy a median-priced house in more than half and in more than three-quarters of the 60 metropolitan areas, respectively,� the study released by the National Housing Conference said.

In the Los Angeles area, elementary schoolteachers, whose median income was $46,110 in 1999, fell more than $16,000 short of the $62,443 needed to buy a $190,000 house, the median price in the second quarter of ‘99, the study found.

Police officers and licensed practical nurses were even further behind. The median income for officers was just $43,050, putting them more than $19,000 away from being able to buy a standard house without a second income. And the median for nurses was $33,240, meaning they were almost $30,000 away from buying on their own.

The estimated median family income in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area during the study period was $51,300.

Police officers, teachers and nurses all earned enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment here. On an hourly basis, teachers made $22.17 in 1999, police, $20.70, and nurses, $15.98. At the time, the fair market rent for two bedrooms was $749, or $14.40 an hour in “housing wages.�

But salesclerks and janitors earned only $7.98 and $7.92 hourly, respectively, and that wasn’t enough to pay for a fair market rent of $592, or $11.38 in hourly housing wages for even a one-bedroom unit without a second job or income.

“No one should be put in the position of having to work two or three jobs to find or remain in suitable housing,� said Helen Kanovsky, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust Fund.

But according to the study, households dependent on a teacher’s salary alone cannot afford to buy a median-priced house in more than half the 60 cities sampled.

In addition, those who depend solely on a policeman’s salary can’t afford a median-priced home in 75% of those markets. And nurses are priced out of all the markets except Rochester, N.Y.

Janitors, moreover, are unable to afford the rent on a one-bedroom unit on 30% of their incomes--the standard measure of affordability--in all but six places, and retail salespeople in just three cities.

However, neither occupation can afford to rent a two-bedroom unit in any of the 60 metro areas included in the study.

Some 3.7 million families who work the equivalent of a full-time job must spend more than half their paychecks to put decent and safe roofs over the heads, according to the National Housing Conference, a coalition of affordable housing experts from the public and private sectors.

That figures represents a 23% increase in just two years, the coalition said, largely because wages have not kept pace with housing prices.

“In some parts of the country, where economic growth has been the strongest, the labor force critical to sustaining the economy either cannot find housing that is reasonably priced or cannot locate within an appropriate commuting distance of their jobs,� said National Housing Conference President J. Michael Pitchford, a senior vice president with Bank of America.

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Lew Sichelman’s weekly housing column is syndicated in newspapers throughout the country.