Quote:
Originally Posted by JCricket
Thank you for an intelligent and courteous post. In the bolded portion above, I do not mean to make it a prediction. Rather, I see it is the way it is. I FEEL that the minimum wage worker already lives in the environment I stated. I think the increase in minimum wage really does little to improve their situation. I don't mean to say we should leave it and not give it to them. That is not what I am saying. In fact, I would say having a minimum wage and law to govern it is good, and if it couple to inflation that is good to. It will keep the poor from going down the drain. My point is, it does little to actually improve their situation. And it has a negative affect on those who are living on a fixed income.
My mother would be a good example. She became disabled at 60 years of age. She is now 73. She can no longer afford rents in denver. At the time she became disable, she could live. She did not have a lot of money, but she could survive. Two years ago we had a population explosion in Colorado. That clearly plays apart in those dynamics. Even so, she was barely hanging on then. Now she lives with my sister(god bless her)..
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Did the rent increases in Denver coincide with an increase in the minimum wage there?
What has happened is that rents everywhere have increased astronomically everywhere since the housing foreclosure crisis, particularly in metro areas like Denver. The people who lost their homes during that time were forced into the rental market. Similarly, young people just starting out in life ended up in the rental market for a number of reasons like being already over-burdened with student debt and under-employed due to the recession. So, this massive influx of people into the rental market significantly reduced the supply of available rentals and thereby created a "sellers market" in rental housing. Some of the most profoundly effected by this are people on fixed incomes, especially since it came in a period of little to no COLA increases.