SANTA CRUZ — It has happened. Again. For the second year in a row, a housing report has ranked Santa Cruz as the most expensive metropolitan county in the nation for renters.
According to the annual , released Thursday, a worker living in the Santa Cruz-Watsonville metropolitan district would need to earn an hourly wage of $77.96 to afford a two- bedroom rental at a fair market rate. Put another way, a local renter earning the state’s minimum wage at $16 per hour would need to work 4.
9 full-time jobs to afford a two-bedroom unit within the region’s fair market rate of $4,054 per month, according to the report. “This news, while disheartening, is not a surprise,” Elaine Johnson, executive director of Housing Santa Cruz County, said in a release in response to the report. “The numbers in these reports demonstrate why we must continue to prioritize housing solutions to make progress for our communities.
” The troubling figure was arrived at through what the coalition calls the “housing wage” — an estimation of the hourly wage full-time workers must earn to afford a rental home at fair market value without spending more than 30% of their income. Spending no more than 30% of gross income for a rental meets the definition of “affordable,” according to . This year’s housing wage in Santa Cruz also outpaced by almost $15 its own high-water mark set last year at $63.
33, which was also enough to earn the . When the county ranked second in 2022, this same figure.
