Imagine you just worked a 111-hour week. That's what many workers in 4 US cities would have to do to afford rent.

• To afford a "fair market" one bedroom in NYC, minimum wage workers would need to put in 111 hours a week, a study found.
• They'd have to work even more to afford rent in Dallas, San Jose, or Chicago.

In the city that never sleeps, some workers literally can't because they need to work to afford a place to live.

That's according to a July study by United Way of the National Capital Area, based on data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). The non-profit group found that workers earning the city's minimum wage — $15 an hour — would need to work 111 hours per week to afford a one bedroom rental at a "fair market" price, which the NLIHC defines as $1,693 per month for New York. When looking at affordability for minimum wage workers, the United Way researchers say that even a fair-market price is out of reach based on their current rate of pay.

It's not even the worst deal on the list. New York City may have the priciest rent in the country, according to Rent.com's September report, but you'd have to work even more hours to afford San Jose, Dallas, or Chicago owing to their lower minimum wages, United Way says. It would take 141 hours a week for a minimum-wage worker to afford a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, 120 for one in Dallas, and 112 for one in Chicago. That's even though San Jose's rental market still hasn't fully recovered during the pandemic, and as Dallas' has grown considerably more expensive over the course of it.

The number of homeless individual adults is 89% higher in NYC than it was 10 years ago, according to public data analyzed by nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless, although homelessness among families decreased. San Jose saw a 34% increase in household homelessness since 2019, according to Santa Clara County data, and in that same time, Chicago saw a 12.6% increase in individual homelessness, according to nonprofit Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Dallas County, which contains Dallas, is also experiencing a gradual rise in its homeless population, according to county data.

New York City's affordability crisis is a more extreme version of the one happening in the rest of the country. The average monthly rent for a Manhattan apartment surpassed $5,000 for the first time in July, and the supply of Manhattan apartments available for rent approached record lows this summer. Renting across the country has also grown increasingly expensive, with prices experiencing a 20-month streak of hikes that ended only last month, according to Apartments.com.

And in the most expensive renter's city in the country, wage increases just aren't keeping up with landlord hikes. In fact, even though workers have demonstrated historic bargaining power over the past few years and earned higher pay across the board, only a handful of them are seeing their wages outpace rising inflation. New York City rents in particular outpaced wage growth by 23% year-over-year this past August, StreetEasy revealed in a study this month. That's the widest gap since 2008.

In reality, it's not likely that many people are working upwards of 100 hours in the country's most populous city — although data typically shows that New Yorkers are working the most hours per week out of any city in the US, nearly 50. Instead of paying sky-high rent prices, minimum wage workers are cramming into tighter living arrangements, going homeless, or far exceeding the recommended portion of one's income they should spend on rent.

It's also poised to exacerbate an existing, alarming labor shortage: that of healthcare workers. Healthcare support workers, including aides in hospitals and nursing homes, were impacted the most, StreetEasy reported. Until this month, the minimum wage for New York home aides was $15 an hour, but got a bump to $17 an hour. That's as aides across the country are already fleeing to higher paying jobs.

With rent going up in expensive cities, it's not the case that workers are foregoing sleep to clock in at triple digit-hours; instead, they're quitting their jobs as nurses and childcare workers and finding better-paying work in other industries.