Here’s how much income Arizonans need to afford rent and what leaders are doing about it
An annual salary of $62,000, or nearly $30 an hour, is necessary to afford the fair market rate of $1,560 for a two-bedroom apartment in Arizona, but the average wage is about $23 an hour. And the state now has the 12th-highest “housing wage,” which is a gauge of affordability for renters, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s latest “Out of Reach” report. The article mentioned that at the Annual Housing Forum in Tucson in August, hundreds of advocates met to discuss the housing crisis, but it only allotted a small portion of the text to the actual solution: Building more homes. It also noted that the Arizona Multihousing Association launched the Arizona Housing Fund, whereby property owners can devote $5 from every lease application to help build more affordable housing.
