THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And all along you are working hard and being paid shit because it's not your work that makes the company a success but all the sweat and toil of that asshole in a suit in the executive suite.

“You’re trying to pay car insurance, rent, electric, cable and if you’re using public transit, putting money on your card, groceries,” said Freeland, who was accepted into a program that provides temporary housing, financial planning and job-placement counseling. “It’s hard to survive out here.”

For households with children, rising housing costs, elevated unemployment and stagnant earnings are increasingly placing rent beyond reach. The housing slump made matters worse as former homeowners turned into renters, increasing competition for available apartments.

“There is just a mismatch between what people earn and what it takes to pay for housing,” said Sheila Crowley, chief executive officer of the Washington-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. “Unemployment continues to be persistently high, and wage stagnation at the low end seems to go out as far as the eye can see.” ...

Nationally, the average hourly wage among renters is $14.32 this year compared with the $18.79 needed to afford an apartment at a fair-market rent, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing, a National Low Income Housing Coalition report found in March. The $4.47 gap this year is wider than the $4.10 differential in 2012.
Not Affordable

The report found that extremely low-income households could afford to spend no more than $495 a month on an apartment this year, while the national two-bedroom fair-market rent was $977.

The number of full-time jobs at the prevailing state minimum wage that people in a household need in order to afford the average two-bedroom fair-market rent ranges from 1.4 jobs in Puerto Rico to 4.4 jobs in Hawaii, the report showed.

As incomes for the impoverished stagnate, rents rose 3.5 percent nationally through Aug. 31, from a year earlier, based on data from Trulia.com, a real-estate website.

“Units with more bedrooms are getting harder to find, and if you have kids, when you don’t have childcare, adequate employment is hard to find,” said Nan Roman, chief executive officer of the NAEH.

Needless to say, single mothers are getting slammed the worst, but in this Republican stifled economy everybody eligible is getting it.