Tag: Affordability
“Young people could afford it if they stopped buying so much iced coffee”
Avg. cost of home:
1960: $11,900
2022: $380,187Avg. cost of rent:
1960: $71
2022: $2,016Avg. cost of 4-year public college:
1968: $329
2021: $10,388Annual minimum wage:
1960: $2,080
2022: $15,080— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 15, 2022
More than 200 unionized HarperCollins employees are on strike today following months of contract negotiations, which began in December 2021 and which, they say, have not yielded a fair agreement for workers.
HarperCollins, based in New York City—where the median rent recently reached $4,000 a month—offers a starting salary of $45,000, and unionized workers make an average salary of $55,000. Employees are calling for a pay increase along with more family leave benefits, improved efforts to diversify the company, and “stronger union protection,” while currently working without a contract, according to a press release.
Employees are currently holding a picket line in lower Manhattan, where others have joined them in support.
HarperCollins workers are on strike today
Corinne Segal
Lithub
Talk to anybody looking to buy a place to live in Denver and they’ll tell you about their struggles. Properties are too expensive for most mortals to afford, bidding wars have been raging, and even though there are slight signs the market is cooling down, prices are still higher than ever.
In fact, Denver just ranked as the fifth least affordable real estate market in the United States. That’s according to an April report from Ojo Labs, an Austin-based real estate company.
In March, the median selling price for a home in Denver was $564,990 (compare that $520,000 in the New York City area). That was 23.2% higher than the previous year, according to the report.
The least affordable city was San Francisco, where the median home price was $1.3 million.
Only four U.S. cities were less affordable than Denver in March
Other than San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and Miami, pretty much everywhere else is cheaper to live.
Kyle Harris
The_Raji
I was living with roommates when I was making 40k a year.
PandaKOST
Notice, too, “roommates” and not “a roommate.” The housing situation out here is bonkers.
Lonely-Criticism1419
Fiancé and I both work full time and we have a studio apt, no kids
ashrnglr
… I make decent money but a house still seems like a dream. Maybe one day
TheAbbott418
… I make good money and a house in this state just is not happening. Remote life is about to be for real…plan to move to a place that hasn’t gone insane.
throwawaypf2015
i make 50k. union job. on a good year maybe 55k with overtime and differential. have my own place. no debt, no kids. i’m struggling tbh.
UBsamsongz
Roommates. 3 bd 2 bt house in the Westminster area. $2200 a month. It goes up in February though
NOTE –
If you’d like to see similar discussion pertaining to any particular city, google something like this:
reddit afford living San Francisco
Results:
1 How do you guys afford to live here? : San Francisco … – Reddit
2 If “nobody” can afford to live in SF – who exactly inhabits all …
3 Is this enough money to live and save in San Francisco – Reddit
4 What do a lot of people in San Francisco do for a living to …
5 How can people afford living alone in SF? : r/AskSF – Reddit
6 I can’t afford to live in SF. : r/sanfrancisco – Reddit
7 How do people afford to buy in the Bay Area without rich …
8 How Do People Afford to Live in the Bay Area? We Asked …
9 Can someone from SF explain to me how people afford to live …
As documented by the January 2022 market-trends report from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors, the red-hot real estate scene in Denver has defied expectations, with the average price for a detached home in greater Denver rising above $700,000, a mark associated with the eye-popping peaks registered during the spring and early summer.
Denver Home Price Average Over $700,000 — Again
Westword
MICHAEL ROBERTS
Blake Kittridge has lived in Denver for 4 years. He moved into the Infinity LoHi building in the middle of the pandemic. He likes living there but recently, they told him they are raising his rent by more than $800 a month.
“I know that this is more of like a price-gouging thing,” he says. “The entire reason they are raising my rent like they are is because they believe they can get that on the market so they can push me out.”
He rents a one-bedroom apartment for $1,650 per month. His landlords just told him rent for next year is going up to $2,490 per month.
Ron Throupe, an associate professor of real estate at the University of Denver. He just completed a second-quarter study about the rental market in Denver. He says rent is up on average by $107 for the quarter.
“That’s the largest rent increase quarterly we’ve ever seen in this survey,” Throupe says.
CBS Denver
Michael Abeyta
march_rogue
We weren’t allowed to do any kind of extra curricular activities. So, no instruments, no joining any kind of sports or girl scouts or anything that required an upfront investment for uniforms or the season. Walmart shoes.
My dad once said I wasn’t really in need of glasses, that I just wanted to look like all my four eyed friends? lol (spoiler alert, totally needed them)
Off brand everything.
Abbreviations-Odd
Keep your hair brushed, your clothes clean, and be articulate and polite in all circumstances. We were not going to be “trash” just because we were poor.
Also, no wearing ripped jeans, even if it’s the style. We’re not spending money on new pants that look like old worn out pants.
ohnoooooooooooooooo
I grew up in a trailer. In fourth grade, a girl was having a birthday party and needed addresses for invitations. The next day she told me her parents uninvited me because I lived in the trailer. That was a new thing I learned I was supposed to be embarrassed about.
I guess just expecting to have to deal with other people’s shitty parents sometimes.
CoolMomInAMinivan
You never brought the field trip permission slips home because you knew better than to make your mom feel guilty she couldn’t pay the $5-20 fee to let you go.
gajillionaire
Going to the doctor isn’t an option until your fever is sustained at 104, a bone is broken, or the tooth rotted and won’t fall out on it’s own.
I am in my late 30’s with full insurance and still have a hangup about going for medical care.
labbykun 2
Paper plate holders were a staple in our house.
A real treat was getting donuts and chocolate milk in the morning.
We knew the exact date of grocery shopping because that’s when the food stamps came in.
Most meals were “experiments” made from the food we got from the food pantry.
We didn’t get next gen. We got a-few-gens-ago gaming systems. And no internet.
‘Why Is It So Expensive?’
We Asked People From Around the
World What They Think of U.S. Health Care.
Video by Chai Dingari, Adam Westbrook and Brendan Miller
From the comments:
Nan
One day I had a serious hemorrhage and was taken to a nearby public trauma hospital via an ambulance. As the doctor was frantically trying to stop the bleeding in the emergency room, I kept rambling incoherently (under powerful anesthetic) to confirm that the hospital was “in network” – the healthcare workers reassured me “you are fine.”Zezee
When my friend fell and couldn’t get up she insisted that no one call an ambulance. She called her brother and waited – in excruciating pain – but she was more afraid of the cost of the ambulance.Jim
I worked for a major medical company (Think of big health insurer they are all the same) when Obama care came around. Did we worry? Nope, because their profit was built in. healthcare companies just wanted to “reject” preexisting conditions . We knew, all the health plans would go up…listening to our “elected officials”, us lemmings in the office KNEW IT WAS A LIE… everyone knew the cost of insurance would GO UP.We had unpaid claims that sat in our database FOR YEARS, never paying them because in a decade…that 50k is cheaper to process and it would just stay in a “round robin” appeals process that goes on forever. (literally we had claims that SAT unpaid for a decade or more because paying a 50k or 1 million dollar claims/debt from 10 years ago is cheaper, we talked about it openly)… All our executives made huge paychecks, huge paydays….. Its ridiculous. Meanwhile the rules are made by companies to pay as little as possible…I loved working for an insurance company, I had the Cadillac of Cadillac of insurance…. Literally it was the only redeeming quality .
Average Denver Home Price Hits $674K, Up $40K in a Month from r/Denver
nmesunimportnt
Median home price is a much better measure since it is less skewed by huge transactions at the top end. Median is still bad at ~$560,000.
Ecredes
The same report has median stats too, up 30k since last month.
EvergreenSea
Sheesh. That’s bad news for us wannabe homeowners.
jballs
Seriously, how do people just starting off afford houses now? I’m lucky enough to have bought our first place 13 years ago when it was still possible to by a place with a 2 in the starting digit. How can people just starting out even hope to buy a house for half a million dollars minimum?
solidtwerks
Is everyone up to the eyeballs in debt?
lhturbo
its a lot of out of state money coming in. Sell their home in Cali or New york for way more value and pay cash here.
meissho1
And I imagine investment firms as well just gobbling up properties so they can rent them out at exorbitant rates.
Joyce Barnes sometimes pauses, leaving the grocery store. A crowd shifts past, loaded up with goodies. Barnes pictures herself, walking out with big steaks and pork chops, some crabmeat.
“But I’m not the one,” she says. Inside her bags are bread, butter, coffee, a bit of meat and canned tuna — a weekly grocery budget of $25.
The shopping has to fit between her two jobs. Barnes, 62, is a home care worker near Richmond, Va. In the mornings, she takes care of a man who lost both his legs, then hustles off to help someone who’s lost use of one side of his body in a stroke. The jobs pay $9.87 and $8.50 an hour. Barnes gets home around 9 p.m., then wakes at 5 a.m. to do it all over again.
She Works 2 Jobs. Her Grocery Budget Is $25. This Is Life Near Minimum Wage
Alina Selyukh
All Things Considered
xXx69TwatSlayer69xXx
What the fuck is lunch debt?
DespressoCafe
Just what you think it is.
You buy food at school, if you can’t you get debt.
reach a certain threshold and you can only get a PB&J or some shit. nothing else
Thetallerestpaul
Fucking hell. Free school meals was massive when I was growing up. It’s a social mobility issue as well. Poorly fed kids can’t concentrate, fall further behind and the cycle of being poor and staying poor continues. Breakfast clubs are now in a lot of UK schools so they kids that need it are able to get at least 2 meals. Not sure how lockdown changes that, but when the first lockdown was announced a lot of teachers I know’s first concern was a load of kids aren’t gonna eat now. And aren’t going to be seen by a responsible adult for months. Heart breaking.
But lunch debt is taking it to a whole other level.
Agreeable_Arrival_87
Fun Story: One school was literally threatening to put children into foster care if their families didn’t pay off their lunch debt so a CEO offered to pay off the families’ debts for them and the school told him no.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/us/pennsylvania-lunch-debt-offer-trnd/index.html
Another Fun Story: Lunch workers who take pity on children and feed them free meals because a lot of food ends up getting thrown out at the end of the day anyway? Those people are routinely fired.
But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.
Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?
“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.
That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.
CYNTHIA: About the end of February, close to March, they laid us off because of the pandemic. And during…
CAMP: She was surviving. And then this pandemic, by no fault of her own, took her job away, took away her ability to pay her rent.
CYNTHIA: They laid us off. They sent the letters, saying, sign up for employment.
CAMP: She struggled to apply for unemployment benefits.
CYNTHIA: So I signed up for unemployment. I didn’t get unemployment till four for five months.
CAMP: And in fact, through the better part of last summer, she did not even receive unemployment.
CYNTHIA: I’m trying to find a place to live. I can’t find nothing. I can’t find another job. I’ve been looking and looking. It’s been a whole year now – you know, going on a year. I still can’t find anything.
SHAPIRO: We’re not using Cynthia’s last name because she doesn’t want this story to affect her future ability to find a place to live. She’s 52 and lives in the St. Louis area with her two adult kids, who’ve also struggled to find work, and her 8-year-old grandson. They’re all in a house where she owes about a year of back rent. There is sewage backing up in the pipes, and the landlord wants them to leave.
CYNTHIA: And I know these people want us out of this house. I want to be out of here just as bad they want us out ’cause I’m not like that, not paying my bills and don’t want to pay. I want to pay.
Amid protests across the country over retail and service jobs that pay little better than the minimum wage, it’s easy to forget that this income benchmark once meant something slightly different. In the past, a minimum-wage job was actually one that could keep a single parent out of poverty.
Since the 1980s, the federal minimum wage has kept pace with neither inflation, nor the rise of the average worker’s paycheck. That means that while a federal minimum wage in 1968 could have lifted a family of three above the poverty line, now it can’t even do that for a parent with one child, working full-time, 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year (yes, this calculation assumes that the parent takes no time off).
Emily Badger, Bloomberg
December 4, 2013