Housing wage

Description

The Housing Wage is the hourly wage a household must earn while working 40 hours a week to afford a rental housing unit at HUD's Fair Market Rent (FMR) and pay no more than 30% of its income towards housing costs.  HUD Fair Market Rents (FMRs) are the 40th percentile of gross rents for typical, non-substandard rental units occupied by recent movers in a local housing market.  30% of income is the federal standard of affordability.

The income needed to afford an apartment at HUD's FMR is calculated by multiplying the FMR for the number of bedrooms by 12 to get the yearly rental cost and then divide by .30 to determine the total income needed for the unit to be affordable.

The Housing Wage as a percentage of minimum wage is calculated by dividing the housing wage by the Vermont minimum wage and multiplying by 100.

Note: The Housing Wage is the same in Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle Counties because those counties form the Burlington-South Burlington metropolitan statistical area (MSA). HUD sets a single FMR for MSAs.   

Need help displaying data? Click below or visit the Data guide to learn more.

Downloading data 

The Vermont Community Profiles are displayed using Tableau, a software that creates interactive data visualizations. These visualizations or "vizzes" are controlled by filters, allowing users to select only the information that interests them. Data can be downloaded for other uses using the Download button on the Tableau toolbar at the bottom of the page in the following download options:

Tableau download menu

  • Image: Downloads the selected view as a photo or displays the image in a new browser tab (depending on browser settings).
     
  • Data: Displays the data from the view in a new browser window in a table with two tabs:
    • Summary: contains aggregated data for the fields shown in the view.
    • Underlying: contains underlying data for the selected fields in the display.
       
  • Crosstab: Saves the underlying data for the selected fields in the visualization to a CSV (comma-separated values) file which can then be opened in Microsoft Excel.
     
  • PDF: Downloads the selected view as a PDF or displays the PDF in a new browser tab (depending on browser settings).
     

  • Powerpoint: Downloads a Powerpoint file containing the selected view as an image

     

Download troubleshooting:

  • The data and crosstab options may be grayed out (i.e. not clickable) on the download menu. To activate these options, you may need to interact with the view. The easiest way to do this is to double click on any data point within the table or graph.
     
  • Sometimes when data is downloaded as a crosstab, Tableau will organize data from a graph or table in a different way than users might expect.   To get more usable downloads, choose the "Data" option in the download menu, which will open the view in a new browser window in a table with two tabs. Select the "Full data" tab. Then click the hyperlink that says "Download all rows as a text file". This will open a csv (comma separated value) file, which can be saved to your computer as an Excel workbook.
     
  • Tableau will only download data from the options selected in the filters. If you wish to download the entire data set, you must select "all" in every field. This may overload the visualization since the visualization does not have room to display the chosen data. However, you can still download the selected data in a table or crosstab, even if the visualization itself cannot display all those fields.
     
  • If there are multiple graphs and tables on the view, Tableau will only download data/crosstabs from the last table or graph clicked on. You cannot download from multiple visualizations at one time. Some visualizations have summary tables at the bottom of the page to facilitate convenient download.
     
  • If the file does not download or the new window does not open, you may need to disable your browser's pop-up blocker.
     
  • Tableau does not allow users to copy text within a visualization on a screen. The best workaround is to download the viz as a PDF and then copy and paste text from there.