Key findings
- Roughly 43% of Buffalo households are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of income on housing.
- Under the Raise the Wage Act, cost burden would fall most for households headed by people of color, narrowing their gap with white-headed households by three to nine percentage points.
- The gains could be temporary, and higher pay can cost families benefits, without longer-term changes to concentrations of wealth and power.
Housing affordability policy usually chooses between universal programs and narrowly targeted ones. This issue applies targeted universalism instead, and uses Census data and a new way of estimating effective hourly wages to simulate the federal Raise the Wage Act in Buffalo.
A universal raise in the wage floor, it finds, would do the most for the households now most burdened by housing costs.
Related
- Low Wage Buffalo · Interactive data on Buffalo's low-wage workforce
- The Raise the Wage Act would help thousands of working families in Buffalo · Blog post, August 2021
Cite this issue
Weaver, Russell. 2021. “The Raise the Wage Act Could Lower Housing Cost Burden and Advance Racial Equity.” High Road Policy 2(1). Buffalo, NY: Cornell University ILR School, Buffalo Co-Lab. https://hdl.handle.net/1813/104227.