Minimum wage earnings won't cover housing costs.
And this surprises ... whom, exactly?
More importantly, who is going to do anything about it? Congress is, at the moment, not remotely concerned with such things. (And leave us not excuse them because of the current crisis; they haven't been concerned with such things for quite some time.) Business isn't interested in making sure their workers have a true living wage; it would cost too much. After all, in order to ensure profitability, businesses will lay off higher-paid nonexecutive workers when they can get away with it; paying low-end workers enough to live on is well down on most businesses' list of things to do. Housing providers aren't terribly interested in building low income housing. (In Chicago, at least, they want to build condos! More more more! now now now! $180,000 and up per condo! And the city is demolishing high-crime but lower rent housing projects and selling the land to developers much faster than it's building or buying replacements. And Chicago is assuredly not alone in this; the housing market has been tightening up across the country for years.)
So now that we know this, what happens next?
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!