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How much money do you need to make rent in Chicago?

Just because Chicago’s minimum wage inched up to $10 doesn’t mean the city is now a more affordable place for low-wage workers to live.

Consider this: An average one-bedroom apartment in the Chicago metropolitan area runs about $922 monthly. That means a renter—or several renters combined—would need to earn $17.73 hourly to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city and suburbs, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition report called “Out of Reach.”

Big picture, that’s about $3,083 monthly, or $37,000 annually.

And it’s not just minimum wage workers who are affected: The average renter in Chicago earns $16.46 hourly—again, falling below that $17-plus hourly threshhold needed to make rent on a one-bedroom apartment.

About 35 percent of Chicago metro area residents are renters.

The wage-rent analysis likely strikes a chord with 20-somethings and 30-somethings.

Data from a study by the organization Generation Progress show that more young people currently are living on minimum wage than in previous generations. In 1979, about 39 percent of minimum-wage workers were between the ages of 20 and 34. In 2011, about 46 percent were between 20 and 34.

Today, about 71 percent of minimum wage workers are Millennials, said Eve Rips, Midwest director of the advocacy group Young Invincibles. She said that one in five Millennials will end up having to move back in with their parents sometime during their young adulthood because paying rent becomes a burden too heavy to bear.

Vanessa Lewis, 26, is one of those Millennials who has ended up back at home. After living with a roommate on the South Side (where their rent was only $400 per person), Lewis wanted to go solo and live in a safer neighborhood closer to her approximately 30-hour per week minimum wage job at Walgreens in Lakeview and her second job at UPS in the South Loop, where she works roughly part time at $16 an hour. At the very most, that would put Lewis’ annual income at about $29,760, or $2,480 monthly.

“The whole roommate thing, I’m over that. I did it, I’m ready to have my own [place],” Lewis said.

But before she is able to make that leap, Lewis said, she needs to save up some money, which is how she came to live with her mother in Albany Park. She has been looking for a studio apartment in Uptown or Edgewater, where she says she thinks she can afford about $700 a month in rent. Fair market rent for a studio in the Chicago metropolitan area—defined in the low-income housing coalition report as the Chicago, Naperville and Joliet area—is $812.

Diomedis Aleman, 21, and her husband moved in with his parents in Humboldt Park last year and have ended up staying because paying rent there is much cheaper than it would be if they had their own apartment—only $400 a month.

But Aleman said that even though the rent is affordable with her in-laws, the situation is not ideal. She wishes she had more space for herself than just a bedroom—a kitchen and the autonomy to run her own household. Plus, she’d like to move to Lakeview, closer to work.

While she and her husband have been looking for apartments and hope to move by the end of the summer, the search has proven difficult. She makes $5.45 an hour—the tipped minimum wage—plus tips working at the Gaslight bar in Lincoln Park on Fridays and Saturdays and at John Barleycorn, where she works lunch-time shifts during the week. Aleman estimates that she makes about $2,800 a month in total with her wages and tips, and her husband makes about $3,600 per month in wages and tips working as a bartender, also at Gaslight.

The couple’s combined incomes, at about $6,400 a month, would be enough to live in a one-bedroom apartment at $922 per month or a two-bedroom apartment at $1,093 affordably. But, as Rips points out, rent in certain neighborhoods of Chicago can be much higher than in other areas, especially on the Near North Side, where Aleman and her husband hope to live. On top of that, both incomes rely heavily on tips and can be unpredictable.

Between the two of them, Aleman said she thinks they could afford to pay about $1,500 a month for an apartment.

Aleman and her husband could get a roommate, as Rips says many other Millennial renters have done, to divvy up costs even more. But the couple wants to be self-sufficient.

“I don’t want to live with a roommate,” Aleman said. “I got married so young—I want to live with my husband, I want to have a family.”

As a whole, Illinois ranks as the 17th most expensive state for housing in the country, with $18.78 an hour needed to afford a two-bedroom statewide. Hawaii is the most expensive at $31.61 and Arkansas is the least expensive at $12.95.

The difficulties in finding affordable housing stem from the twin problems of low wages and high rents, said Elina Bravve, senior research analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Increasing the minimum wage is a slow process politically, she said, and most housing developers want to target middle- and high-income renters when building multi-family housing units.

The disparity is not a problem that Bravve thinks can solve itself, and she said assistance programs will always be warranted.

“There will always be a need,” Bravve said. “There will always be low-wage workers of some sort. There will always be people…who live off Social Security income or [Supplemental] Security Income. There will be senior citizens. There will always be some folks with disabilities who will need some affordability to get by.”

Caitlin Wilson is a RedEye contributor.