by -iamnowhere-
For some of us, the housing crisis is more than an abstract concept; it’s an existential crisis.
I was born in California.
In 2000, at the age of 20, I rented a studio apartment in LA for around $600/mo. It consisted of a bedroom with a bathroom at the back, which had been separated from a larger apartment to make an additional unit. Other expenses included utilities, groceries, and fuel for the daily 2 hour (roundtrip) work commute. I worked full time as an Admin Assistant for ~$12/hr.
In 2004 I moved into a studio in SF at a cost of $775/mo. This was converted from a section of the garage in the basement of a complex, and consisted, like the other, of a bedroom and bathroom. Other expenses included utilities, groceries, and fuel for the ~90 minute work commute. I worked full time at a mail and copy shop for ~12/hr.
In 2005 I moved to a 1 bedroom apartment in a small city. For the same price of $775/mo I received a designated covered parking space, a bedroom with separate lounge and full kitchen, as well as access to a small patio and shared green space. Other expenses included utilities, groceries, and fuel for the ~1 hour commute to school/work. I afforded this through a combination of part time work in website maintenance at $12/hr and student loans.
In 2010 I was no longer receiving college aid and had insufficient wages to cover costs, so was forced to relinquish my rate-locked apartment, which was rented out at over $1K upon my departure. I rented a privately owned rv trailer for $600/mo before utilities and worked full time in web retail at $14/hr, with a ~2 hour roundtrip commute.
In 2015 I was admitted to university and had to leave work to attend, but became eligible for student loans again, which enabled me to afford a privately owned 1 bedroom apartment offered below the market rate for $995/mo, ~30 miles outside the city. Due to the heavy workload and arduous commute, I spent little time in social activities outside class.
In 2017 I graduated. With no job lined up, I moved back in with my parents who lived in the mountains. The only work I could find there was in hospitality at a high-end resort for a rate of $15/hr.
In 2022 I took my savings and moved to the UK where I rented a 1 bedroom flat for ~$650/mo + ~$100 for utilities. I worked part time at the library for ~$15/hr (which was the only place that would hire me on a visa), rode public transit and shopped at the discount grocer, Aldi. I survived on roughly $1K per month, working 16.5 hours per week.
In 2024 my visa expires and I’m forced to return to California, where the average monthly cost of a studio is ~$2300 and a 1 bedroom apartment is ~$2800. Minimum wage is currently $16/hr which, working 40 hours per week, would barely cover a 1 bedroom apartment before we even talk about additional living costs. And since income is usually required to be ~3x the monthly rent, a full-time minimum wage worker wouldn’t be eligible for consideration, regardless.
In over two decades, the cost of an apartment has more than tripled, but my hourly wages have increased $4.
Is Rent Control not the answer? Fine. But employers can’t or won’t pay wages at a rate in line with cost of living and “building more apartments” has done nothing to resolve this gap, either. Low income flats still demand over $1k/month, take years to come off waitlists, and (rightly) prioritize families meaning an individual is never going to receive an offer or, if they did, be able to afford even that on a single income. Which forces people to remain indefinitely dependent on family, continue living in dorm-style cohabitation, or become homeless.
For those of us who are no longer willing to remain a burden on family and have no mature adult friends available with whom to cohabitate, homelessness seems increasingly inevitable. Having worked in the library with a clear view of the toll that homelessness takes on physical and mental health, this makes even more final solutions seem increasingly reasonable. So when I say that this is not an abstract, philanthropic point of moral concern but an urgent existential crisis, I am not merely being hyperbolic. Although not yet on the streets, it feels as though we’ve already been consigned to the trash heap, branded a demographic of “not-good-enoughs” and slotted for a slow-moving population purge.
Researching this issue, reading the tidal wave of richly-funded arguments, based on studies predominately limited to before the pandemic, which lambast rent control each and every election cycle without ever proposing a novel solution, feels like insanity. Since rent control has long-since been dismissed as ineffective by wholesale — the arguments have all been made — it feels as if this “correction” is a red herring, trotted out each time to give the appearance of an attempt while distracting from the glaring vacancy of any real effort. A binary choice between a narrow form of rent control and incentive to construct are presented as the only possible means to mitigate this amplifying human crisis.
And truth be told, bulldozing every available scrap of land during a climate crisis in order to cram as many people as possible into brutalist dwellings together until there’s no place left to build… while anything that promises to meet a person’s intangible needs, like light and quiet and green space, would be identified as a luxury dwelling for the wealthiest… doesn’t sound like a way out of hell. But I digress.
If killing rent control to stimulate construction is the foregone conclusion, then do it and stop staging these pointless debates that are dead on arrival. Stop dangling solutions that aren’t solutions, and give us some reason to hope. Or stop pretending that you believe life is equal, and everyone deserves the same opportunities. Stop pretending that “more housing” is all it’s going to take to save the lives of the swelling numbers of us finding ourselves on the edges of society while salaried politicians and real estate moguls sit in their high houses and toast to their latest success.
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