Interesting stats, but it could be more clearly spelled out that progressive are not saying everyone NEEDS to be able to afford a 1 bd room by themselves.

For those who oppose a living wage, can you explain the cognitive dissonance I see? When a full time (rare) Wal-Mart employee requires public assistance to simply survive, we as a community subsidize private for-profit businesses and corporations by underwriting their shortfall. Below living-level wages COST our communities directly in food stamps, housing subsidies, reduced school lunch, needed donations from food banks, utilities assistance, etc. Certainly not everyone needs a 1 BR by themselves, but parents might. What's the solution here? The idea that working class poor can simply leave to find something paying more elsewhere is specious, one needs capital to even move. If you can't afford to eat or put gas in a car after paying rent (if you even can afford to keep one running, major problem in bus-shy suburbs & rural areas) how do you pull up stakes and move? How do you save 1st, last & deposit when you can't put shoes on your kid's feet? Blaming the worker for the results of the race to the bottom capitalist economy is a distraction and does nothing to address the very real life problems of the humans involved. One might feel morally superior doing so, but it's simply back-patting; a waste of ink and air.

A good part of the cost of housing in Seattle is because of the policies of city hall. Unless those policies change any increase in wages will soon be eaten up.

@4, of course you know they don't mean that.

Bullshit.

Move to White Center if you can't afford the rent. All of you worthless Millennials think you deserve to have a place on Capitol Hill or on Queen Anne with a view of the Space Needle.

@6 wow. What an absurd & pointless comment. What about us single mother's just trying to provide (when I say provide that includes somewhere reasonably safe when it comes to hazardous & sanitary living conditions, & preferably out of the straight ghetto, fuck the space needle ... To be blunt)..

And while doing so still be able to clothe,feed, @ supply my children and myself with any other necessities. .. forget 'wants' at this point. ..
I'm referring to medical emergencies, gas or bus money to get to and from school, the store, a doctor's appointment. ..ect.

Then because I'm working more than I'm doing anything else, let's hope I have a huge pool of family & friends that have nothing better to do than watch my children because daycare is more expensive in one week than I make in two weeks! & let's hope to God they have the will and morality to show my child good & Not be teaching/displaying behavior that ends up negatively impacting my child's life at some point.

Not everybody had a silver spoon in there ass, or had parents who were able, or frankly parents who cared enough to guide and show their children the path to success to adulthood...
Most people who make it successfully in life whom are fully self sufficient undeniably and was highly likely to of had some form of help whether it be a head start, a connection, or financial security and stability helping them through school.. or was provided with financial security in general...
I couldn't even imagine how I could possibly come up with or save a first,last, & security deposit that would even be enough for a place in the slums.

Your thought process is Fucking retarded and I'm not asking for a free ride or trying to get sympathy--but the acknowledgment that our system is fucked off--the rich do continue to get richer and the less fortunate very seldom get out of poverty by themselves without help. Not everybody has the luxury of a caring family or a rich family for that matter..
The way things are now hardly make it obtainable--let alone possible to become self sufficient individual in our current working class economy.

I can't speak for anybody else but this millennial doesn't 'expect' shit from anybody or anything for free. I'm happy earning my way--the point I'm trying to get across here is that in this economy I'm statistically unable to ever become self sufficient. And that's the hard truth.

-Hard working 25 y/o single mother of two

@2 I couldn't agree more.

The headline on this article is incorrect - it should say two bedroom.

Minimum wage is a pretty complicated issue. I think the suggestion of setting it to 50-60% of the area medium income is pretty sound as a starting point, and I was generally surprised by the number of progressive policy people who have expressed real concern at our upcoming CA experiment.

Yes, low minimum wages are "corporate welfare" but you could also call them business subsidies to motivate offering services in lower density regions. This is something it's important to do in one way or another, because for a high quality of life people need both money and places to spend it.

If an hour of labor costs Chipotle $15 in every county, they will have an incentive to open stores in only high density neighborhoods where they can sell 10 burritos every minute. So you can yank their corporate welfare, but then you might need to cut them an actual check in order to get burritos out to the ozarks.

That my be preferable to food stamps, but the "corporate welfare" is probably going to happen on way or another until people just stop living out in the country.

Guys......there are people who spend more money in a year maintaining their personal superyachts than most of us combined will make in our entire lifetimes, and this woman is struggling to have enough money to feed and keep her child healthy. The minimum wage argument is distracting bullshit.

The question that we honestly should be focused on is why we refuse to decide on a standard of living that should be the bare minimum for our society despite the fact that we clearly have the resources to do so as a society. I'd much rather live in a society where I know that everyone is taken care of at least to a bare minimum than a society where I have the ever-so-slight chance of becoming very wealthy, but I also have a much higher risk of becoming very, very poor, to the point where even necessities like food and healthcare have to be withheld.

It can still be a competitive society, but we have to recognize that the stick of poverty is insanely disproportionate to the carrot of wealth in America. We also have to grow up and realize that money isn't the only way, nor even the best way to motivate people and make them work hard. And that our obsession with money as the be-all-end-all to how we measure things in our society is KILLING US, when you look at things like food waste, our obsession with micromanaging who is worthy or charity, the hoarding of vast and (at that point) meaningless oceans of wealth for no other purpose than because it's there to be had.

I recognize that this is an issue that is a lot harder to fix and off-topic, but I feel like until we stay on focus about why these problems are being created in the first place, we'll always be fighting these stupid fights amongst ourselves about whether or not people who have jobs slightly lower than mine deserve to make slightly more than their making, while the rich continue to fuck every one of us babbling on about it.

#7: very true, poverty is a trap (9.47 w/ part-time kid). But don't worry about #6! 😂😂😂 this person comments all over the slog, like 'che taylor was a damn thug!', And 'charles mudede is a MORON', and 'you're a fucking moron, you idiotic moron!', aaand 'fuck you stranger i hate you'(despite the fact that they comment on half a dozen articles every month).
They preface rants with 'pro tip;'... They add 'fix your fucking party, democrats' as a tagline repeatedly....
Basically, you're dealing with an angry, sarcastic troll who loves calling people morons.
(And I hate to go there, but they're unaware that their confusion about which their to use is not going to convince anyone how smart and perceptive they are.)