California runs a Safe Parking Program operated by New Beginnings Counseling Center. It is a local nonprofit that provides a place to park and rest overnight. The temporary rest spot for low-income workers is in parking lots attached to churches, nonprofits, and city property.
Sleeping overnight inside a car is one of the few options left to almost 92,000 residents of Santa Barbara, California, which has a 7- to 10-year wait list for subsidized housing. To worsen matters, it is difficult to find a single room for rent below $1,000 in a rental market that has a 0.6 percent vacancy rate, Curbed reported.
Nightly clients
The program has about 150 nightly clients made up mostly of workers who spent the evening in their vehicles. At daytime, 35 to 40 percent have work as painters, gardeners, servers, nurses, and veterinarians. The lack of affordable housing makes sleeping inside cars as the only temporary solution for these people.
Home1, an advocacy group, in a study, estimated that 11 million Americans spend more than 50 percent of their salary on rent. A tenant who earns minimum wage and works 40 hours a week can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 12 counties in the US, data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said.
Because of the big chunk of the paycheck that rent eats, the average renter, after deducting housing costs, is left only with $488 a month in 2016. If the amount is adjusted for inflation, it is 18 percent less than what they were left with in 2001. During the same 10-year period, between 2001 and 2011, the average rental housing cost went up by 5 percent, but the income of the average renter dipped 15 percent.
Spending the night camped out in parking lots and along highways seems to be a better option than commuting more than 50 miles to the workplace which 11,950 or one-fourth of Santa Barbara employees endure, according to US 2015 Census data. Another one-third, or 2.724 residents, commute longer than 50 miles but earn less than $1,250 monthly. In 2002, only 7,515 workers traveled an average of 50 miles to reach their workplace.
Commute times worsens
The average commute time in the US of workers went up in 2015 to 26.4 minutes, while the number of Americans who work in another county and live in another ballooned to 40.1 million in 2014 from 23.5 million in 1990, data from the 2015 American Community Survey found. By spending longer hours on the road driving or commuting, it is taking away more money from the working poor since the cost of commuting takes up almost 6 percent of their income, twice that of high-income workers.
Business Insider reported that researchers from StreetLight Data discovered the place where residents travel the longest distances to work in the US by analyzing location data from commuters in 933 metros with a population of at least 100,000. They analyzed the medium, round-trip journeys of about 20 million commuters in September 2017.
Laura Schewel, the CEO of StreetLight Data, said the main objective of the study was to look into the links among the three socioeconomic factors of income, education level, and rent prices. The researchers noted that among these factors, having a college degree is the one most highly correlated with having a short commute.
The study named Bishop in California as the city with the longest commute for its 4,787 residents. Their median commute distance was 70.2 miles, while median rent was $824. It was followed by Ocean Pines in Maryland where the median commute distance is 29.2 miles, but the median rent is a whopping $1,411. In third place is Ocean City in New Jersey which has a median rent of $1,076 and a median commute distance of 26.6 miles.
Overworked residents
Meanwhile, a new study from WalletHub showed the US cities where residents could be considered the most overworked in the country because of long work hours, a lengthy commute, multiple jobs, and lack of vacation time.
The top five overworked cities are Washington DC, Jersey City, Manchester in New Hampshire, Minneapolis, and St. Paul.
The other option for harassed and overworked employees is to find jobs in cities with lower rents and home prices. The Los Angeles Times noted that sky-high rents and home prices are making it harder for businesses to recruit workers from out of state because of the more than 90 minutes of one-way commutes. This has resulted in more people leaving California than moving in.
Economists pointed out that businesses and employees are less productive and it slows down economic growth because of housing costs. It pushes companies to expand in cheaper states and leaves the remaining California residents to have lesser money to buy gadgets, entertainment, and to attend sporting events.
A 2017 survey of major companies in the LA areas, conducted by the USC/Los Angeles Business Council, found that 10 of 14 respondents said the cost of housing is a challenge to retain workers. Many reported losing employees because of high housing prices.
[researchpaper 리서치페이퍼= Vittorio Hernandez 기자]