Not only do in metro Denver, but apartment rents are stretching them financially, too, according to a .
Denver was the 11th-least-affordable metro area out of the 50 that ApartmentList examined in terms of whether teachers could afford the average apartment without spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent.
Nearly one-third of the metro areas studied, mostly on the coasts, have average rents that aren’t affordable to teachers. In the most expensive markets, San Francisco and New York, fifth-year teachers would need to spend 70 percent or more of their paychecks to afford the average rent on a one-bedroom apartment.
Denver isn’t that extreme, but apartment rents here represent a greater burden on teachers than in any other U.S. metro area in the interior of the country.
“A fifth-year teacher in Denver needs to spend 39 percent of their income to rent a one-bedroom apartment, just slightly behind New Orleans,” said Andrew Woo, a data scientist with ApartmentList.
A 10t-hyear teacher needs to spend 37 percent of their income to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Denver. And a first-year teacher can afford an apartment, but only by splitting the rent on the average two-bedroom with another person. That brings the rent burden down to 26 percent of income.
