New report says minimum wage workers cannot afford modest housing

With all of the joyous news that greeted the May Jobs Report, from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the much heard, phrase, of “this is a tight job market”, the issue of wages, or more accurately, wage stagnation, was often politely shoved aside to preach the good news of job growth.

There was only a slight increase in wage growth from the prior month, a gain to some eyes, from the previous moribund reports, it seemed a gainsay, for many economists, bankers and other spokespeople for the American financial industry. But, 2.7 percent wage growth seemed tepid, and with job growth coming in strong with lower skilled jobs, that require little more than a high school education, the economic base seems constructed on a new paradigm.

“This is the last shoe to drop in the labor market,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank. “It’s just a matter of time before wages start going up more strongly, but there’s frustration that it hasn’t happened yet, even though unemployment is the lowest it has been in almost 18 years,” he told The New York Times.

Another facet  was that many of these jobs are entry level and many paying minimum wages, and despite liberal voices asking and, in some cases, demanding a guaranteed minimum hourly wage of $15 dollars, being able to find affordable housing, on that income has become a challenge.

In Illinois, the challenge has become even greater, than in previous years as “renters in Illinois must earn more than $20 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment,” stated a new report from Housing Action Illinois, the state chapter of a nationwide organization, the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Starting July 1, there will be an increase in the new Chicago minimum wage to $12 per hour; and that's a 45 percent increase since 2015, according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office.

Currently, that wage is $11 per hour. According to the local ABC affiliate, “the increase is part of a plan to raise minimum wage in Chicago to $13 per hour by 2019.The mayor's office said about 367,000 workers will get a raise by July 1, 2019, as part of this plan.”

While many have lauded the good news from CIty Hall, the challenge to housing in Chicago is greater than ever and the report notes, that “In order to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment in Illinois, renters need to earn $20.34 per hour. This is Illinois’ 2018 Housing Wage, revealed in Out of Reach 2018: The High Cost of Housing, a national report jointly released in Illinois by Chicago-based Housing Action Illinois and DC-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. This means that to afford a two-bedroom home without paying more than 30% of their income on housing costs, a person earning Illinois’ minimum wage ($8.25 per hour) must work 99 hours per week just to make ends meet,” they said in a statement heralding the bad news.

Looking even more closely, “a household must earn $3,525 monthly or $42,304 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into an hourly Housing Wage,” of the aforementioned, $20.34.the calculated cost for a modest two-bedroom apartment, it became obvious that the wage challenge proves to be nearly impossible to meet for minimum wage workers.

Going even further, we see that two-and-a-half of full-time jobs at minimum wage “are needed to afford a 2 -Bedroom Rental Home at Full Market Rate.”

“In Illinois, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,058. In order to afford this level of rent and utilities — without paying more than 30% of income on housing — For a modest one-bedroom apartment, at $8.25 an hour the prevailing state wage, it would take a worker 83 hours to meet the cost.”’ their research showed.

With the upcoming national mid-term elections getting closer and closer, both the  statewide and local elections, and especially, for mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns. The report authors make this point::

“Every legislator should be talking about the fact that nowhere in Illinois can a full-time minimum wage worker afford rent,” says Sharon Legenza, Executive Director of Housing Action Illinois. “And every candidate seeking an elected office should have a plan for how to change this. Housing should be a source of stability, not insecurity. Voters deserve to know how our elected officials intend to make sure that every one of their constituents has a good, affordable place to call home.”

“Out of Reach 2018 finds that average cost of rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment in Illinois is $1,058 per month. In order to afford this, a household must earn at least $42,304 annually. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $20.34,” they also noted..

With varying statewide rents, “there is no place in Illinois where a minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Rental housing is the most expensive in Kendall County, where the Housing Wage is $23.56, followed by the Chicago metropolitan area, where the Housing Wage is $22.69. The lowest that the Housing Wage gets for an average two-bedroom apartment in Illinois is $12.88, which is still more than 1.5 times the minimum wage.”

The Chicago Metropolitan Area, with its glut of low-wage workers, often laboring in fast food restaurants, hotels and sanitation crews are the most inevitable workers that try to meet the challenge, And, in our interviews, most of them are trying for this Herculean task, by working two and even three jobs.

To say that this is a crisis, is an understatement, and statewide there 1,635,043 renters, reperesting 34 percent of the state as renters.

In October of last year, Sen. Dick Durbin’s office released some good news: “U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) today announced that Northern Illinois communities will receive $3,880,550 in federal grant funding through three programs administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  In total, Northern Illinois communities were awarded $2,957,019 through the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program, $182,521 through the Emergency Shelter Grants (ESG) program, and $741,010 through the HOME Investment Partnerships program.”

What is needed, is a targeted program to marry money with deliberate development to address the needs of minimum wage workers.
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Also helping to identify local and national lawmakers to press in this area, especially during the challenges of the Trump administration, and identifying and helping educate them on the issue would be of prime importance.

Increasing the vouchers and subsidies are essential , but how much could even the most modest bump help those workers in targeted areas across Chicago and Illinois, would be a necessary adjunct.

Pessimists suggest that the slim boost, in wages, about one percentage point above that of April suggest that this may be a no-win situation, for the present time.

Lastly, what efforts, if any, can those that are most affected by the need, do to let local and national lawmakers that they need to do more?

These and other questions were addressed to Housing Action Illinois, but by press time, there was no response, or from the office of Sen. Durbin.

For the full report go to: http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/OOR_2018.pdf

Will Lori Lightfoot's crusade lead to being Chicago mayor?

Holding an elected office in Chicago has become akin to either death by a thousand blows, or sheer masochism, and those are during the good times. Certainly, the job of mayor falls under that category and into the already crowded fray, of decided, and even undecided, a crusade of sorts has entered the melee, in the form of Lori Lightfoot, attorney and most recently president of the Chicago Police Board, and chair of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, has plunged into the race for mayor of the nation’s third largest city with an equally crusading spirit.

She has taken two issues on, the appearance of an ethical violation with Chicago School Board president making a public advertisement for school performance improvements, and paid for by a group of heavy financial backers for Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Secondly, the sex abuse scandal in Chicago Public Schools that has not shown either proper oversight, or even the appearance of protection, to a system that has been burdened with debt and weak test scores, before the recent improvement.

All of this seems part and parcel of the work that the 53 year old attorney has done, and often under the proverbial bushel basket as many have not known of her intense work on behalf of the city, and especially in the unenviable task of police reform.

“She’s got a long track record on police reform. She’s not viewed as being part of the establishment. She has positioned herself to be a change-agent,” said Victor Reyes, the former Daley political operative who ran the now-defunct Hispanic Democratic Organization at the center of the city hiring scandal.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported, in their profile of the candidate, “Lightfoot could probably make it into a runoff in a fractured field with just 30 to 35 percent of the black vote, 25 to 30 percent of the white vote and 35 to 40 percent among Hispanics.

Citywide the black population of Chicago is 32 percent, with 45.3 percent white, according to the 2010 census; a significant statistic that cannot be ignored.

Getting votes is a numbers game, and having the other five black candidates remain in the race, as she, or any other candidate, can harness both the black and Latino votes, is paramount.

“It would definitely help to [narrow the field], but having them take votes helps her, too. As long as they’re subtracting from Rahm, they’re helping her,” Reyes said.

“Greg Goldner, who managed Emanuel’s 2002 congressional campaign, advised Lightfoot to follow the playbook that carried County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to a landslide victory during a 2010 campaign master-minded by Ken Snyder, who just happens to be Lightfoot’s political consultant.”

He noted, that “She unified the African-American community to a large extent, and she was able to get white progressives,” Goldner said of Preckwinkle.”

Matching the crusading spirit with political acumen may make the grade, not only if it makes her the city’s second black mayor, but also the first lesbian, in a city with a strong, and supportive gay community.

Her idealism may be her strength, as she noted, when announcing her candidacy and said, “In order for Chicago to remain a world-class city, we need to forge a new path, in which equity and inclusion are our guiding principles. By almost every measure, we currently are headed in the wrong direction,”

 “All over Chicago, people feel the effects of the us-versus-them style of governance. Investing here, but not there. Providing advantages to some, but not others. Listening to a few, but ignoring far too many. That mentality and style of governance ends the day I am sworn in as mayor.”

Hearing that, former alderman, and now, professor of political science, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dick SImpson, said that he “believes Lightfoot has the potential to “assemble a progressive coalition similar to Harold Washington’s.”

“The police issue is the hottest and most important issue of all. … She has a very strong record on the police issue. That will have a lot of appeal in the African-American community,” Simpson said.

He also “advised Lightfoot to turn up the heat and make it uncomfortable for aldermen to stick with Emanuel, no matter how much money he offers to drop into their campaign coffers.”

“She needs them to choose sides and she needs to get somebody to choose her …Some group needs to mobilize behind her and really push her candidacy. The ideal would be to get a number of the minor candidates to drop out and endorse her,” Simpson said.

The police problem, along with the violence, has become one of Chicago’s more durable problems, as epitomized by the Laquan McDonald shooting, and the coverup of the video that showed the discrepancy between what happened, and what was reported, with the searing result that the states attorney lost her bid for reelection, with accusations of a cover up, and loud demands and angry street demonstrations for Emanuel’s resignation.

In a city with a long history of racial segregation and police brutality, no issue could command more of a crusader’s attention, for reform.

Recently during a local radio appearance, she noted that the vast majority of police are in their jobs for the right reason, but also that there cannot be “abuse of the power that they’ve been given.”

That abuse was the problem with the suppression of the McDonald tape, but also reaches back to the days of Cmdr. John Burge, who was convicted of brutally torturing black male prisoners.

Even later was an expose by a British newspaper, The Guardian, (which I explored in a column for my now defunct Examiner column), that resulted in a lawsuit that describes a facility in Homan Square as an “off the books police detention, interrogation, and intelligence gathering center where the CPD unconstitutionally detained many thousands of predominantly, and disproportionately, African American and Hispanic citizens without probable cause and without access to lawyers and family.”

They also reported “from August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.” 

When the Guardian reports first surfaced, local activists demonstrated demanding that the facility be closed, but police denied the accusations, according to The Chicago Tribune.

Much of the anger - especially that of Chicago’s black community has centered on Emanuel, who in 2013 closed 50 schools in the city’s black neighborhoods forcing grammar school students to cross gang-infested neighborhoods to reach their new schools, a move that prompted the temporary hiring of citizen guards to protect them.

It is this type of occurrences, systematic, at times, that she would confront as mayor.

Lightfoot has the types of rags to riches story that America loves --- worked seven jobs for her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, and had a grandfather who was a sharecropper ---  a similar profile that propelled Oprah Winfrey to stardom, and power, on the small screen.

When she earned her J.D. at the University of Chicago, “she organized campus protests against the discriminatory hiring practices of Baker McKenzie, the multinational law firm. Although Baker McKenzie was one of the university’s biggest benefactors, the protests culminated in the firm being banned from recruiting on the U. of C. campus.”

Taking on big boys, and even bigger projects, shows that Lightfoot is not afraid of tackling an issue and the importance of discipline ---- as how she financed her university degree, shows discipline and the campus protests at University of Chicago, reveals the profile of a fighter for a seemingly impossible cause.

The charges of sexual abuse at Chicago Public Schools, and Lightfoot’s handling also are part of a crusading campaign, where with over 430 charges, there were 230 of them convicted. And, as she noted, getting in front of the issue, we have to “build an infrastructure to protect our kids . . . this is the sad and sick reality.”

Going back even further “In 2005, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley asked the team of Lightfoot and Mary Dempsey to clean up a minority contracting program disgraced by scandal. In the course of cleaning house, Lightfoot and Dempsey made waves by taking on powerful targets. They included Tony Rezko, the now-convicted former chief fundraiser for now-convicted ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich; Elzie Higginbottom, Daley’s chief fundraiser in the black community; construction giant F.H. Paschen, and the O’Hare outpost of O’Brien’s restaurant, an Old Town institution.”

Now, the biggest boy to take on is her former boss, who has shown, much like Daley, father and son, that he knows how to keep the City Council under his thumb.

As Paddy Bauler famously said, “"Chicago ain't ready for reform yet" and if it is, and the reform begins with a black woman, of modest means, then the city is long overdue.