In Houston, wages don't always pay the rent

From the Houston Chronicle opinion section:

A much larger hump on the income curve is the number of people employed in Houston making $6 or $7 an hour, or maybe $60 a day.

Doing the math is pretty easy.

Sixty dollars times five days is $300 per week. Four weeks per month means $1,200 per month of total income. Since half the households in Houston are composed of one or two persons, this means total household income for a substantial portion of our residents is just that: $1,200 per month. With the cheapest apartments renting for $500 per month plus utilities, many families double up, live in cars, or make the tradeoff between food and electricity.

Drive in some neighborhoods and you'll notice the large number of little hibachi grills in the front yards of apartment units. Barbecue lovers? No. People without electricity.

Click here for the rest.

And this bind isn't simply in H-Town; it's in pretty much every city in the country. The bottom line is that, unless you've got one of those increasingly rare good-paying jobs, it is impossible to exist in our "free market" economy. As soon as I'm out of grad school, that's precisely the position in which I'll find myself.

I remember when I lived in Austin during the early 90s, at the beginning of the tech boom. There was a housing shortage then, and rents were skyrocketing. At one point, I was comforted by an article proclaiming that developers were planning to build buttloads of apartment units. As I continued to read, however, my comfort turned to anxiety when I realized that all those new apartments were aimed at upscale white collar workers, and rents were priced accordingly. That is, if you were working as a waiter or in some other crappy low wage job, you were shit out of luck. Fortunately, I managed to worm my way into a roommate situation with an informal landlord who was charging us waaay less than the market was dictating at that point. In other words, I got lucky.

But most people in such a predicament aren't lucky.

You know, this housing problem, and how most new housing is aimed at the high end, is a pretty darned good example of how the "free market" most certainly does not take care of average ordinary people in the long run. Indeed, the "free market" doesn't care about average ordinary people at all, which is why America really, really, really needs to revisit many of its assumptions about the way things work.

'Cause this is a bunch of bullshit.

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