You won’t believe this shockingly disingenuous housing affordability study

In this week’s housing affordability crisis news, activists and bloggers are pushing a new, shockingly disingenuous study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) to make a case for a minimum wage much higher than the $15 an hour activists have been pushing for.

The NLIHC aims to answer a simple question: what would your hourly wage need to be in order to afford a modest apartment in your neighborhood? This assumes you follow the general rule of spending 30 percent of your income on housing.

Their takeaway is the same it’s been for the last several years and is in lockstep with housing activists: it’s become more and more expensive to live in Washington. In fact, we’re the 10th most expensive state in regards to housing affordability.

Here’s the data they present:

-In WA, on average, you need to make $21.69 to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

-In Pierce County, you’d need to make $21.02 an hour for the two-bedroom apartment.

-In King County, where we’ve been hearing the most complaints over housing affordability &#8212 a hefty $27.21 an hour for a two-bedroom apartment.

Obviously, if you’re a grocery store clerk in Tacoma or Puyallup, you’re not making $21.02 an hour. If you’re working retail at the Northgate Mall or Lincoln Towne Square, you’re not making $27.21 an hour.

So the takeaway from this study is to get you to support raising the minimum wage. They report, in part: “A renter earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would need to work … 102 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom Fair Market Rent.”

Related: Skyrocketing rents? How about you live within your means?

Sounds like a compelling argument to raise the wage if you want people to live comfortably. Predictably, journalists and activist bloggers are running with that message.

But did you notice a data point that I quoted above? It’s a key data point they use. In fact, it’s the default data point.

They’re talking about a single person making minimum wage and what it would take to live in a two-bedroom apartment.

They say the two-bedroom housing wage in Washington state is $21.69. No, it’s not. It’s $10.85. Why? Because two bedrooms are generally for two people (at a minimum).

If two people working full time – either roommates or a couple – put their money together, they can easily afford a two bedroom, modest apartment on minimum wage in Washington.

It may still be tight – it may still be uncomfortable, depending on your lifestyle, your commute, etc. – but it paints a dramatically different picture than the misleading one they want to present.

And this is important because the majority of people who are working these low-skilled, minimum wage jobs are single young adults.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says over half of the minimum wage workers are under 25. Of that, half are teens. Pew Research backs the numbers up. That’s the face of the minimum wage in this country.

By the way, they’re overwhelmingly white – 77 percent, in fact. We’re told how this is a social justice issue; that the face is a single mom who has two kids and two jobs and is black or Latina. But that’s not the majority of the cases. It’s a white college grad or high schoolers just entering the workforce. And when you’re just entering the workforce, you have no skills to demand too high of a wage. You’re hoping that you can impress someone enough to hire you with no experience, then let you gain the experience you can then exploit for a higher wage at the same company or a different one.

And they shouldn’t be living in a two-bedroom apartment alone if they’re unwilling to understand it costs more than they can afford.

Related: Seattle’s ‘walkability’ hurts the poor

Now it is true that there are single parents, for example, who also have minimum wage jobs. Luckily, they’re in the minority, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help (it also doesn’t mean, by the way, that we shouldn’t talk about choices that lead to poverty, which includes “waiting until age 21 to get married and have children,” per the left-leaning Brookings Institute).

But a blanket claim that is so easily dismissed with the facts does their side a huge disservice. How about we work together to come up with additional policy prescriptions for Americans in that situation, rather than pretending the 21-year-old kid with a degree in interpretative dance should be making $27.21 at a retail job so he can afford a two-bedroom apartment.