I glided my car off of the 10 freeway, a California interstate that crosses Los Angeles from west to east, to find a scraggly old man wearing a filthy coat and clutching a tattered cardboard sign that read: Will Work For Housing. He stood at the freeway exit, about three cars ahead of me.
When the signal light turned green, the guy in the BMW SUV in front of me stuck his head out and screeched at the top of his lungs toward the homeless man, "Get a job you lazy SOB!" The SUV tires practically burned rubber before the homeless man could fully understand what happened.
For those of us living in the Los Angeles region, what many refer to as the Homeless Capital of America, such outbursts of anger are not infrequent. After a few decades of the escalation of homelessness in this country, some hardworking people feel resentful at people who take advantage of our nation's social welfare system. Especially when the roots of this country are founded on a Puritan culture that embraces the mantra: there is no such thing as a free ride.
But to simply scream at a person entrenched in extreme poverty to get a job will not end homelessness for that man standing at the freeway off-ramp.
Here's why. In Los Angeles, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment, as of May 2011, is $1,315 per month. Many housing experts believe that in order for a person to be able to pay for housed-living (such as food, utilities, transportation and clothing), a person should not pay more than one-third of his monthly income toward rent. That means in Los Angeles, the homeless man standing near the freeway needs to earn $22.76 per hour to afford the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment.
Minimum wage in Los Angeles, however, is only $8 per hour. A person earning this rate could barely pay his rent, and would have nothing for food, utilities or anything else. In other words, he would be sitting in an empty apartment, darkened because of no electricity, and hungry because of not enough income to buy food.
Even if a person paid half of his monthly income toward rent, he would have to find a job that pays $15.17 per hour to afford a Los Angeles apartment.
It doesn't take a mathematician to conclude that this social math just doesn't work.
So, like passionate activists in Northern Africa, the voices from American homeless advocates are rising, calling for a mandatory wage rate that would allow a person to earn enough money to pay for rent. People like Richard R. Troxell, the author of the book, Looking Up at the Bottom Line, are promoting a "Universal Living Wage."
Their message actually reflects a Puritan perspective: full-time work should be rewarded with access to permanent housing. If a person works 40 hours per week, he should have the ability to afford housing.
Critics, however, don't believe in an artificial employment market. Pay rates should be based on a free market's supply-and-demand environment, otherwise businesses will move away from communities that instill mandatory living-wage rates.
But if businesses move to regions where the minimum wage is so low that its low-paid workers have no chance of finding a home affordable enough to rent, then businesses will have a very small talent pool of people.
It used to be that one full-time wage earner in America could support a family of four in a home that the worker actually owns. Today, America's families need at least two wage earners just to be able to rent a one- or two-bedroom apartment.
The odds of that homeless man standing at the freeway off-ramp finding a job at $22.76 per hour (or $47,340 per year) are nearly impossible. Screaming at him to find a job that pays enough to rent an apartment is simply futile.
Ending homelessness in this country means raising the rate of pay for hard-working people, or lowering the rate of rents, or building enough apartments that are affordable to everyone.
My vote is to get that homeless man near the freeway into an affordable apartment first, then help him find a job.
Maybe that man's cardboard sign should read: Will be Housed For Work.
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Understanding poverty and homelessness in America / The Christian ...
The author has a good point. Having a place ought to be a human right.
What 'average' means here is that half of the apartments in LA can be rented for less than that amount. By the third sentence, the author has dropped the word 'average' altogether and is claiming that you need $15.17 to afford just 'a Los Angeles apartment' - when he really means an apartment that is better than ones that half the population is currently living in. Anyway, how many people live alone? If you are part of a working couple; the same math would work out to $11.38 per hour.
The $15.17 figure he mentions is a different standard - he uses that wage level to denote the "one-half of wages to pay rent" mark, as opposed to the one-third level mentioned earlier.
Even so, the claim "how many people live alone" doesn't take into account the fact that those people may be living together out of necessity rather than choice. A lot of people take a roommate not because they want to, but because they have no other choice - there's simply no way for them to afford housing otherwise.
1) Trade restrictions
2) Immigration restrictions
Both. Not either/or. Both. Period.
It won't happen. The logic of globalization will be followed off a cliff and the working class will be destroyed.
It's only a matter of time when they will be at the worker's mercy. They won't even see it coming because it's cyclable, just like the weather and the economy. Tough luck for corporate as*holes. Get ready for record wages for organized global workers. Most will soon have had enough. Their time for prosperity is coming and the greedy corporates will be over out of necessity. They have already pushed the envelope to an unsustainable level.