And for all the people out there who want to criticize like “Why do you need two bedrooms?” or “Get a better job if you want luxuries.”
1. You’re being deliberately horrible to other people. Stop.
2. If you are a parent, you probably need a couple of bedrooms so you and your children have a place to sleep. Or maybe you aren’t a parent, you’re living with a partner or a friend or a relative who is unable to work. Same thing, you need space to sleep and call your own. Not cramming everyone into one bedroom or making someone take the couch every night isn’t really a luxury.
3. The whole idea of the minimum wage when it was first implemented was that it would be enough to support a family on one person’s wages. Food, shelter, medicine, et cetera. And now, one person’s wages can’t even cover housing for the family *anywhere in the country* let alone food or medicine or anything else.
This isn’t trivial — this means tons of people are homeless and hungry and sick. This means that they labor as long and as hard (or usually longer and harder) as everyone else and they still can’t afford a warm place for their family to sleep.
I don’t think it is at all a stretch to say that people working for minimum wage are being robbed, and that that robbery has real and violent effects on laborers and their loved ones.
so true.
Don’t forget the “two heartbeat” law in some places: two people per bedroom, regardless of age. If you’re one working person with 2-3 dependents, you can’t just live in a one-bedroom place to save money. You can’t have a bunch of roomies or a big family condensed in one apartment or even let your friends crash on the sofa. For every two people, there has to be a bedroom — even if the bedrooms aren’t used.
My family would’ve had a much easier time getting back on our feet after homelessness if we could’ve just moved into a one-bedroom place and had me sleep on the sofa — far from ideal, as OP points out, but we were willing — but it’s literally illegal here. All three of us were employed but we could hardly afford to live anywhere.
They wanted to charge us $20 extra a month at our old 1BR apartment because my husband and I lived together in it.
A tax on married people. What the superfuck?
We are finally in a 2BR but it’s still not easy to get by.
The whole idea of the minimum wage when it was first implemented was that it would be enough to support a family on one person’s wages.
The whole idea of the minimum wage when it was first implemented was that it would be enough to support a family on one person’s wages.
