In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home working a standard 40-hour work week. In North Carolina, a worker would need to earn about 17 dollar an hour to afford that same two-bedroom apartment. In reality, more than 1-in-4 North Carolina households are cost-burdened, and pay at least 30% of their income for housing. We recently sat down with Samuel Gunter, executive director of the NC Housing Coalition to discuss the findings of a new national report, appropriately titled Out of Reach.

Read the full report here.

Learn more about the new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Read the full report: The Status of Women in North Carolina: Health and Wellness

Read Knopf’s story at NC Health News.

New research by Western Carolina University suggests it would be cheaper to purchase the threatened properties in North Topsail that are at greatest risk than to spend millions of dollars over 30 years trying to constantly protect the property through beach renourishment, sandbag walls, and other barriers. We talked to Andy Coburn with the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines about the findings, and what other coastal towns could learn from the research.

Senator Natasha Marcus discusses Governor Cooper’s compromise budget offer, a bailout for North Carolina’s rural, struggling hospitals, and investigating a cancer cluster in the Mecklenburg County area.

Brian Kennedy, policy analyst for the NC Budget & Tax Center Brian Kennedy, policy analyst for the NC Budget & Tax Center, discusses how North Carolina’s 100 counties are faring across key indicators of economic well-being and opportunity. Click here for the 2019 County Economic Snapshots.