Jin Zhao, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Think about what this is saying: The Federal formula is that a person should pay no more than 30 of their income for shelter, and in the United States a fully employed 40-hour a week individual working for the minimum wage cannot afford housing in even the meanest one bedroom apartment. While at the same time one house is being built in Los Angeles to sell for $500 million. And there are buyers. Do you need a clearer example of wealth inequity?
Hours needed at minimum wage to afford a one-bedroom apartment (National Low-Income Housing Coalition)
A new report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition shows that there is no state in the U.S. where a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford the rent of a one-bedroom apartment, Vox reports. (emphasis added)
According to the report, the national average Housing Wage in 2015 is $19.35 for a two-bedroom unit, and $15.50 for a one-bedroom unit, while the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour in 2015, which hasn’t been raised since 2009. In 13 states and D.C., Housing Wage is more than $20 per hour. The Housing Wage is an estimate of the full-time hourly wage that a household must earn to afford a decent apartment at HUD’s estimated Fair Market Rent (FMR) for no more than 30% of their income.
The data from the report show a gap between wages and rents across the country. In no state or D.C. […]
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Adam Wren, Contributing Editor at Indianapolis Monthly - Politico Magazine
Stephan: It is one of America's greatest and saddest historical ironies: The Red value states that scorned homosexuals and their crisis of HIV, and that looked down on Black inner city drug addicts are now centers for both heroin addiction and HIV. Here is the current status of the HIV/drug addiction trend's impact on the Red value states. It may surprise you.
It will be fascinating to watch how voters who elected the Republican governors and legislatures who scorned the HIV positive and addicted, and whose policies reflect that, will respond now that these two social afflictions affect conservative White communities.
Do you think needle exchanges will look a little different to those politicians and those voters?
HIV Testing
Credit: Health Watch Center
It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in Austin, a one-doctor-and-an-ice-cream-shop town of 4,200 in southeastern Indiana, nestled off Interstate 65 on the road from Indianapolis to Louisville, where dusty storefronts sit vacant and many residents, lacking cars, walk to the local market. Not in rural, impoverished Scott County, which had reported fewer than five new cases of HIV infection each year, and just three cases in the past six years. Not in a state where, of the 500 new cases reported annually, only 3 percent are linked to injection drug use.
But it did. And it could happen in many more backwoods towns just as unprepared as Austin.
As the largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in Indiana’s history roils this Hoosier hamlet, it reflects the changing face of the epidemic in the U.S., as a disease that once primarily afflicted gays and minorities in deep-blue cities rises in rural red states. This new evolution of HIV is also forcing a new generation of Republican policymakers to […]
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