San Francisco and San Mateo counties in the Bay Area have passed a grim milestone reflecting extreme housing costs: The federal government now considers households in the counties which make $100,000 a year to be “low income,” making them eligible for federal housing programs for poor families, most notably Section 8 vouchers that allow more than 2.2 million U.S. families to pay only 30 percent of income toward rent.
The specific income threshold for the two counties is $105,350 – less than the $115,300 median annual household income of those counties. Strikingly, however, the poverty threshold in the two counties is nearly 90 percent higher than the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate of median U.S. household income ($56,516) and more than 60 percent higher than $64,500, the census estimate of median California household income.
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