Salinas faces Bay Area housing costs without Bay Area pay

A household income of about $75,000 has not kept Gaye Freedman and her husband from falling further into credit-card debt in Salinas, California. Their one-bedroom apartment costs $1,850 a month. After rent and Medicare payments, little remains for food, fuel or repairs to their 14-year-old car. Freedman, 75, now plans meals around what will stretch beyond a single day, according to Guardian Business (direct).

Their experience reflects a wider squeeze in the hometown of novelist John Steinbeck. A recent Brookings Institution analysis ranked Salinas as the least affordable US city for the middle class, defined as the middle 60% of income earners. Nearly 60% of middle-class households in the Salinas area cannot cover basic necessities, twice the national average. Those households earn between $38,000 and $193,000. Among Latino middle-class households, which account for 40% of the area's middle-class total, three-quarters struggle to afford everyday life.

Rich farmland, stretched household budgets

The contrast is striking in a valley that supplies more than half of America's lettuce and nearly a third of its strawberries. Steinbeck used its agricultural wealth as a setting for stories about people pursuing a better life. Today, homeownership remains beyond the reach of residents interviewed by the Guardian. Brookings senior fellow Andre Perry, who oversaw the analysis, said places once seen as refuges from expensive cities were themselves becoming difficult to afford.

Housing experts point to Salinas's proximity to Silicon Valley and the farmland surrounding the city. The former exposes it to the Bay Area's housing pressures; the latter limits room for expansion. A persistent shortage of homes has pushed prices higher, while local earnings lag those of nearby economic centres. Median household income in Salinas is just below $90,000, compared with roughly $150,000 in San Jose or San Francisco. Mayor Dennis Donohue described the imbalance this way:

“You have all the economic challenges of the Bay Area impacting Salinas and this area without corresponding economic opportunities.”

For Salvador Herrera, a 52-year-old former construction worker raised in Salinas, the squeeze means sometimes having only $50 for a week's groceries for himself and his two children. An injury at work left him dependent on disability payments. He described families sharing increasingly crowded homes, with garages divided by curtains and parents and children packed into single bedrooms. Freedman faces a different constraint: moving somewhere cheaper could mean losing access to medical facilities that she and her husband need as they age.

Rent caps offer relief, but supply remains tight

Salinas introduced a rent-stabilization ordinance in 2024, limiting annual increases on certain multifamily rental properties to the lower of 2.75% or three-quarters of the annual inflation rate—the pace at which prices rise. Freedman's apartment became covered that year. She said the limits have already saved her thousands of dollars. Yet the policy has sharply divided residents, while new housing has been slow to arrive.

The local struggle sits within a national housing squeeze. The latest US census data cited by the Guardian show that half of renter households and about a quarter of homeowner households spend more than 30% of their income on housing. California has statewide rent caps and additional local protections, but still has the country's highest median monthly housing costs.

The issue to watch in Salinas is whether relief from rent limits can be matched by progress on housing supply. Residents are caught between constrained budgets and limited alternatives, while the city faces the harder task of making its housing costs fit the incomes its economy provides.