Orange County sees significant gap between wages and housing prices

Orange County is the fifth most expensive county in North Carolina to live in — tied with Durham and Chatham counties — and many residents with lower incomes have a hard time keeping up with the rising cost of housing. 

Nancy Oates, Chapel Hill Town Council member, said the gap between income levels and the cost of living in Orange County is something to be concerned about. 

“We have a lot of modestly paying jobs in Chapel Hill, and if we don’t have places for people to live where it’s convenient, we're going to have trouble getting people to fill those jobs,” Oates said.

She said school bus and city bus drivers are two jobs with low paying salaries, but the University and UNC Hospitals also have many modestly paying jobs with workers who might have trouble finding housing in Chapel Hill and other areas of the county.

“What’s going to happen is people are not going to commute in — it’s inconvenient and it’s expensive to park,” she said.

In Orange County, the hourly housing wage required to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment is $18.02 an hour, according to the 2016 Out of Reach Report – an annual study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition that documents the gap between wages and the price of housing by state and county. 

A housing wage is defined as the hourly wage an individual needs to afford housing without being cost burdened, which means they are allocating no more than 30 percent of their income toward rent.

In Orange County, 40 percent of households are renters. 

The minimum wage in North Carolina is currently $7.25 an hour. The rent affordable at this wage is $377 a month. 

The average renter wage in Orange County is $11.82 an hour. The rent affordable at this wage is $615 a month. 

The fair market rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment in Orange County is $937 a month, according to the report. A person would have to work two-and-a-half full jobs at minimum wage, or 99 hours per week, to afford that. 

Orange County Living Wage is a nonprofit organization that certifies businesses for paying their employees a living wage of $13.15 an hour, which they define as what an individual would need to cover their most basic needs over the course of a year.

"Typically, what happens is if you’re making $7.25 an hour and if you have a family, you’re living in poverty,” said Susan Romaine, chairperson of Orange County Living Wage. 

Stuart Bethune, vice chairperson of Orange County Living Wage, calculated the minimum living wage a business must pay in order to be certified by the organization. 

“My analysis of N.C. Department of Commerce data shows that 40 percent of the people working in Orange County earn less than a living wage,” Bethune said.

Romaine said the child care, retail and restaurant industries typically pay lower wages, while many businesses in the health care industry have adopted a living wage in the county. 

“A living wage is actually really good for their business," she said. "It makes the worker more reliable, they notice customer relations are better, there is a reduction in absenteeism and turnover, and training and recruitment costs are not as high."

The towns of Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Hillsborough have all adopted a living wage for their employees.

Just as Orange County Living Wage and other organizations aim to raise income levels, the town of Chapel Hill is putting effort toward affordable housing.

The town approved Neighborhood Conservation District Zoning Overlays, which help maintain older neighborhoods and subsequently keep housing prices low.

“Any other housing is going to have to be subsidized, and I think taxpayers need to come to terms with this — stop just talking about affordable housing and realize something needs to be done about it,” Oates said.

Oates said the University and the town need to work together on housing to ensure that the town does not approve too many off-campus student housing options that could negatively affect the number of students living on campus. She also said the University needs to work with the town by requiring sophomores to live on-campus in addition to first-years.

Oates said the University does not pay a living wage and she'd like to see them raise the wages of some of the lower paying jobs. 

“I’d like to see the University raise some of the bottom level pay of the jobs,” she said.

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