“The 20010 zip code made up by Park View, Columbia Heights and Mt Pleasant is actually paying 62% of their take home income on rent!”

via RadPad

From an email:

“As D.C. rents continue to rise as fast as anywhere in the country, what D.C. residents are feeling it the most in the wallet?

RadPad, the apartment search and rent payment startup, decided to take a look. To do this, it examined thousands of active one-bedroom listings across zip codes in D.C. to get a median one-bedroom apartment price for each postal number.

It then utilized 2015 U.S. Census Data with help from Income by Zip Code to get median household income numbers for each of the same zip codes. From there, RadPad was able to calculate what percentage of monthly take home pay residents from each zip code (after taxes for a single filer) are spending on rent.

And here are some highlights:

• Middle-class Park View & Mt Pleasant are Being Hit Even Harder in the Wallet than D.C.’s Lowest Income Areas: While thoughts may turn to the lowest income brackets (and rightly so), it’s actually a few middle-class neighborhoods that are feeling it the most in the wallet with rent payments. The 20010 zip code made up by Park View, Columbia Heights and Mt Pleasant is actually paying 62% of their take home income on rent! Compare that with the recommended notion of spending less than 30% of your take home pay on rent.

• Low Income Areas East and South of the City are Feeling the Rent Pain Though: As you can see from the graphic above, the highest percentage of take home income being spent on rent is largely in the zip codes and neighborhoods that make up the east side of the District of Columbia. This is especially noticeable in the southeast side of the city, in areas including the 20032 zip code (53% of income on rent). Out of all the zip codes we looked at, this area of Congress Heights and Washington Highlands, had the lowest median household income ($34K). Rent price issues for low income households isn’t isolated to D.C. of course. Data released by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University earlier this year illustrated that 60% of all renter households earn less than $50,000. Furthermore, a third of all renter households earn less than $25,000 a year. 

• Those in Friendship Heights, Chevy Chase and Penn Quarter are Paying the Least Amount of their Take Home Income on Rent (20%): These areas also make up some of the highest income neighborhoods in the greater D.C. metro area. 

Again the full analysis on the data is here.”