In several states, a renter must earn $20 or more per hour to afford apartments being leased at Fair Market Value. Nearly half of Americans don’t make enough money to afford a one-bedroom rental.
Personal stories about struggling to make ends meet appear throughout the report, “Out of Reach: The High Cost of Housing.”
Vee, from Missouri, said her small wage increases don’t make a dent in rising rent costs.
“Everything is going up, but the paycheck,” a woman named Detrese from Maryland told the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which authored the report.
The report focuses on the housing wage, defined as the full-time hourly wage needed for workers to afford “a decent rental home that doesn’t occupy more than 30% of their wage.”
On the national level, the data show that a renter needs to earn about $28 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Half of working Americans earn less than that, according to the report.
Published on Thursday, the report begins with an open letter from Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri that warns about the ongoing affordable housing and homelessness crisis in the U.S.
“I know these challenges firsthand. As a child, my family and I lived in public housing. We relied on it to put a roof over our heads, and to make sure there was enough money to put food on the table,” Cleaver writes.
In at least four Midwestern states, minimum wage is not enough to afford a two-bedroom rental at Fair Market Value.
Renters in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri need to make at least $20 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental. Minimum wage earners would need to work several full-time jobs to afford it.
Costs are even higher in Illinois, where it takes earnings of almost $30 an hour to afford a dwelling of the exact same size.
“People have lower incomes in those places, so the housing might be more affordable, you know, nominally, but not necessarily, relative to people's incomes,” said Dan Emmanuel, the coalition's director of research.
Nowhere to go
According to the NILHC report, only one out of four prospective renters eligible for housing assistance is able to receive that aid, and budget cuts to federal programs proposed by Congress will drastically impact those who need it.
Under the 2026 Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development measure, almost a billion dollars could be cut from HUD, an amount which the NILHC acknowledges is not as high as originally proposed.
In remarks at a July Appropriations Committee session, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who chairs the committee, said:
"The bill empowers local housing and community development decision-making through Community Development Block Grants and NeighborWorks—capacity-building activities that leverage private housing investment dollars.”
Emmanuel said many people will lose their housing and could become homeless as a result of the proposed cuts.
“(HUD) won't be able to serve the same amount of people as in 2025,” Emmanuel said.
Tina Murray, vice president of housing at Together Omaha, a food and housing advocacy organization, is concerned about the end of housing programs. She said there is already a big shift in housing affordability in Omaha due to the end of the pandemic-era federal funds and predicts a gradual rise in evictions after the federal funding is no longer available.
“What we're seeing now are a lot of individuals that I believe will not be able to afford where they're living, or be able to be re-house,” Murray said.
Omaha is one of the most expensive areas for renters in the state of Nebraska. The housing wage in the state’s largest city is about $24, while the state housing wage is $21.57. The average Nebraskan renter earns $17.71 an hour, only about four dollars above the state minimum wage.
According to the report, Kendall County, in the Chicago metropolitan region, is one of the most expensive areas for renters in Illinois. The housing wage there is $36.27, higher than the state’s housing wage of $29.81. The average Illinois renter makes $23.01 an hour, about seven dollars above the minimum wage.
Vikki from Illinois shares her story in the report, describing feeling trapped, as her only housing options to relocate with her son are in "unacceptable conditions."
Cleaver said people of color are disproportionately impacted by the rising cost of rent, lack of affordable housing, and low wages.
In comparison to white people, people of color face higher rates of housing, employment,t and income discrimination. Latina women face the biggest wage gap, earning nearly 11 dollars per hour less than white men. The unemployment rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives was 6.6%, roughly double the rate for white people.
“There is a long, long history of housing discrimination. Either through red line exclusionary zoning or predatory lending. And some of those practices are even persistent in the present," said Emmanuel.
Causes, solutions
In his introductory letter to the report, Cleaver sums up many factors contributing to what the NILHC calls an “affordability crisis” in housing.
“While the stories and circumstances are unique, the root causes of housing instability are not: there are not enough decent, affordable, and accessible homes in communities, and wages have not kept pace with the ever-increasing cost of rent,” Cleaver writes.
The NILHC states that another factor contributing to the shortage of affordable housing is the practice of upward filtering, where landlords and developers renovate old buildings and rent the units at higher prices.
The authors of “Out of Reach” say solutions to the affordability crisis are available.
The report urges Congress to protect housing programs and expand the existing assistance. One of its suggestions is to continue the Emergency Housing Voucher program, created through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
“Congress must not only protect existing housing programs but significantly strengthen them through sustained investment, expanded rental assistance, and policies that eliminate barriers to housing access,” the report says.
The NILHC points to the Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act as a step in the right direction. The bipartisan measure would provide 250,000 housing vouchers to families with young children to increase housing stability and offer them more choice in where they live.
Jessica Meza is a Journalism & Advertising and Public Relations student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jessica is the Hortencia Zavala Foundation 2025 summer intern working with NPR’s Midwest Newsroom, the Latino News Network (LNN), and the Fulcrum, as part of our NextGen initiatives.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio, and NPR.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.