Yesterday’s SL Tribune ran an article highlighting an affordable community that is being built in the downtown SL area. I posted this article earlier today on my page but here’s the link for those of you who missed it. http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12561289?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com I love the fact that someone has taken notice of the need for affordable housing in Salt Lake and are willing to take a risk and do something about it to help people. As I read the article I was impressed with the thought the developers have about those people in our society who work every day for less than $10 an hour, most with no health insurance provided by their companies (another tangent). Then I read the readers comments about the article and my blood pressure rose with anger that people are so shallow and closed minded about the reality of society.

Comments such as:

“This does sound like the Projects-type apts. are coming to SLC...sorry to see that - I suppose to be expected in growing populated cities...”

“Beware when you hear "affordable housing" folks... it only goes downhill from here on out...I'm sorry.”

“Why don't we work on the wage side! You know education etc... so that people are not making so little per year.”

So here is my rant: Affordable housing does not have to equal the projects. “The Projects” are what happens when the community looks at the people who live in affordable housing with little regard and respect. It’s about how we treat people. Are the people who work in jobs that pay $7 an hour less of a person? They make those wages because to raise them would mean raising the cost of the service they are providing you. What service are they providing you? Let’s explore.

Low-wage earners are typically in service related fields; food service, mercantile, janitorial, etc. Even if we educated the people who are currently working in these jobs so they could get other jobs these jobs STILL have to be done and someone else will come in and do them. So why not raise the pay for these individuals? Why don’t we force the employers to pay livable wages? These appear to be a very sound argument. Now I’m terrible at math and never took an economics class in my life but even I, in my very simple language can see that this argument is full of holes.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if everyone earned a “livable wage”? What would that mean though? All those food service workers earning $7, for example, let’s pay them $12 an hour (still not livable but you get the idea). That’s an extra $5 per hour per employee. But let’s just look at one employee. Give her a raise of $5 per hour and multiply that by 8 hours for the day. That’s an extra $40 a day the employer has to come up with in profits, just for one person. Let’s say it’s a small business that employees say, 10 employees. Now the employer has to come up with an extra $400 a day. Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from YOU the customer by means of increasing what YOU pay for. Arguments are that you as a tax payer don’t want to pay for the housing? Well, either way you will pay, either as a tax payer or as a consumer. There is no way around it.

Why do we view poverty or people in poverty as a plague? Why are we so scared of those who live in poverty? Is it because we know that we could all be there one day? That each of us has the potential of losing it all somehow and being there and that fear drives us to look down on the issue as something that is “their fault” rather than an issue of our society as a whole? Having grown up in a family where, pretty much every year, our household income for our family size would have been considered impoverished. We had very little “extras” growing up and I know that more often than not my parents had to make critical choices about what would get paid and what wouldn’t. With attitudes that I read from readers today I’m surprised that I turned out as well as I did, according to their logic my family was poor because of uneducated, unmotivated parents and my sisters and I, should, logically, now be burdens on society and/or incarcerated.

Just recently, I was talking with a potential grantor and he brought up a low-income housing project and the issues surrounding that project now that it has been bought out and is no longer “low-income”. I stated that I had actually lived in those “projects” when I was in my early teens, that my family, in fact was the first family to move into those “projects”. He seemed shocked that someone like me had grown up in poverty and, at the end of the discussion said something along the lines of “Alison, can I congratulate you on being able to rise up and become so successful, despite your past”. Because my parents were poor I am supposed to now be a failure in life?

What is the point of my rant? Well, it goes back to a common theme found in some of my other rants. People are people and we should treat them that way. Look beyond their color, their income, their religion, their abilities or disabilities. Look past if we’re fat, or thin or bald or hairy and treat everyone as human beings. When we’re able to do this we’re able to see people as we see ourselves, that we all have strengths and weaknesses, we all have our good days and bad and we all have days when we should just wear a hat.