In popular (and pricey) cities such as New York and San Francisco, the idea of outrageous rental prices is easy to grasp. These are the places that birth urban legends about awful housing situations: Three people living in a 400-square-foot studio, or a friend of a friend who’s paying $1,800 for a room that is, technically speaking, a closet. But dangerously high rent isn’t about just sticker price—it’s about price in relation to income. And that’s a problem in cities all over the U.S., even those that might seem cheap by comparison.

The New Orleans metro area is one such example. There, according to a rent index compiled by the housing website Zillow, a one-bedroom apartment costs around $1,400—far less than in the astronomically priced San Francisco Bay Area, where similar units go for more than $3,000. Even though New Orleans’s prices might seem more reasonable by comparison, they can still be quite burdensome: More than 35 percent of the city’s residents spend 50 percent or more of their salaries on rent. (That's significantly more than the national average, which is about 25 percent.)

These imbalances make more sense when the state of the local economy is taken into consideration. In New Orleans, unemployment is about 6.3 percent, which is higher than the national average, and average weekly wages are about $980, which is lower than the national average. Louisiana is also one of only five states with no minimum wage law on the books. For workers there, wages automatically default to the federal minimum of $7.25, a number that hasn’t changed since 2009. That helps explain why comparably low rental prices can be so onerous, and why the city’s poverty rate is so high, with around 27 percent of the population living in poverty in 2013, compared with only 16 percent nationally.

When it comes to the rental market, New Orleans, like many cities, has an issue with supply, with many people vying for a small number of available, affordable units. But unlike many cities, New Orleans is also still recovering from the catastrophic hurricane a decade ago, which ravaged most of its housing stock. But because most of the city’s rental market is made up of single-family homes rather than large apartment buildings, the benefits of rebuilding efforts have been mostly distributed to homeowners, not renters.