If the construction cranes, the new restaurants and your monthly rent bill weren’t enough proof that the District’s real estate market is for the deep-pocketed, here’s more evidence: Your household needs an income of about $119,000 a year to afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the city, according to a new report.
The SmartAsset report, which DCist website first spotted, figures that a household should spend no more than 28 percent of its monthly income on rent. That’s what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says is the ideal spending threshold.
The market-rate rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the District is $2,783 a month, according to the report. (Note: This is looking at traditional two-bedroom apartments, not converted one-bedrooms or multi-bedroom row houses.)
That would make the District the fifth-most-expensive U.S. city when it comes to rent. In San Francisco, the country’s most expensive city by these metrics, a household needs $216,129 a year to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment.
According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which SmartAsset cites, 54 percent of U.S. renters in 2014 spent 30 percent or less of their income on rent.
Here are the most expensive cities for renting and what a household needs to earn annually if it spends about 30 percent of income on a two-bedroom apartment:
- San Francisco, $216,129
- New York, $158,229
- Los Angeles, $145,629
- Boston, $120,900
- D.C., $119,721
Census data show that the average median income in the District for the years 2010 to 2014 was $69,235. That suggests that most people in the city are probably spending a lot more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
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