New evidence surfaced last week showing that life is getting worse for America’s renters, two news reports said.

The Associated Press and Wall Street Journal did a mashup of two economic reports that demonstrate monthly rents are rising faster than incomes.

The online real estate site Zillow.com reported rents increased 4.3 percent in June from a year earlier in the nation as a whole (and 3 percent in Orange County).

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That’s double June’s average hourly wage increase of 2 percent reflected in government data, the news outlets reported.

“Rents are insanely unaffordable on a historical basis in the United States right now,” Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries told the AP.

The Zillow monthly rent index doesn’t include apartments, but is based instead on the median estimated rent for single-family, condominium, and cooperative homes in Zillow’s database.

Still, other rent indexes show that rent hikes are getting steeper.

RealFacts, which surveys Orange County apartment complexes of 90 or more units, reported last month that O.C.’s average asking rent increased 6.9 percent year-over-year, to an average asking rent of $1,848 a month.

Commercial data firm Reis Inc., which surveys apartment buildings of 40 units or more, reported local rents up 3.2 percent year over year to $1,703 a month.

Local agents report Orange County vacancy rates are so low some rental units are generating bidding wars, with renters offering to sign longer leases or pay rents above the landlord’s asking price.

For the last few years, some university real estate professors have said the nation is in the grip of a “rental crisis” in some of the hardest hit metro areas.

Zillow figures, for example, show rents jumped at double-digit rates in San Francisco (up 15 percent), San Jose (up 13 percent) and Denver (up 13 percent).

Los Angeles County had Southern California’s biggest jump in Zillow’s June report, up 7 percent, with 5 percent gains reported in San Bernardino and San Diego counties. Riverside County rents are up 4 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reported the share of renters considered to be cost-burdened in the 25- to 34-year-old age bracket rose to 46 percent in 2013, up from 40 percent 10 years earlier.

“Rents have skyrocketed so much and incomes haven’t kept pace,” U.C. Berkeley’s real estate center chairman Kenneth Rosen told the Wall Street Journal. “So we have an affordability crisis in some of our major metropolitan areas for the middle housing market.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com