A new report from apartment listing site RentCafe looked at how much renters can afford in the country’s 100 largest metro areas without spending more than 30% of their income, which is what is considered “rent burdened.”
To pull off this almost impossible feat in Tampa, RentCafe found that the average apartment size in the area is 925 square feet, which means the average renter who makes the median renter household income of $35,380 a year can only afford to live in a 619-square-foot box. Good luck with that.
The study also ranked Tampa as the 65th in the nation for this abysmal apartment size, followed closely by St. Pete, which can only afford a 652-square-foot pad.
This study isn’t anything new. Tampa Bay desperately needs more affordable housing options and it also needs higher paying jobs. According to 2018 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters in the Tampa Bay area need to earn at least $41,800 a year to afford a basic living. For those of you making Florida’s dreadfully low minimum wage of $8.25 an hour, that means you would need to work 84 hours a week to have a roof over your head.
What’s also troubling is that even if you include homeowner salaries, which raises Tampa’s average income to $48,911 a year, the area still comes in dead last among major U.S. cities for median income, according to a 2016 study from the U.S. Census Bureau.
This disparity is only getting worse. The more you work and the less you make, the more Tampa Bay’s wealth gap grows. A recent study from Apartment List found that Tampa’s richest residents now make 11.4 times the lower income residents, which is a jump of more than 16% in the last decade.
Follow @cl_tampabay on Twitter to get the most up-to-date news + views. Subscribe to our newsletter, too.
This article appears in May 2-9, 2019.
