The increase in the minimum wage is one thing, but the cost of renting or owning a place in this city is another. Working at 40 hours a week (if you are lucky enough to have a full-time job) at an hourly wage of $15 ends up being about $31,000 a year. The average rent per month in this city was nearly at $1,200 in 2013. If you are a single person, you’d be lucky to find a place in this city that met with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s idea of affordable housing (which is “30 percent or less of household income“)
KUOW:
[I]n the Seattle area, approximately 60 percent of people responding to a KUOW survey reported thay they spend more than 30 percent of their annual household incomes on housing.
So what is a possible solution? How could we make Seattle affordable? One of the main answers: Break our dependency on private transportation. Car ownership claims about 15 percent of a household’s annual budget. (The City of Seattle claims that the average household income in the 206 is $85,600.) And the further you are from the city core, the larger the share this car business (insurance, taxes, gas, repairs) claims on your income. But Seattle is now pushing its poor out of the core (the $15 minimum may even accelerate this process), and we are cutting bus services between the periphery and the core. And cutting bus services in the core. And we are still building massive parking lots beneath new residential and commercial places. And we have no major infrastructure plan to reduce our dependency on cars or a major cultural program to re-engineer our opinions on cars. It is still not considered madness in our society to buy, own, and drive a car.
- CM—A View From a Bus Window
