Low pay poses a major threat to Asheville and it’s long, long past time to stop pretending otherwise
Art by Nathanael Roney, commissioned for the Asheville Blade.
If a culture of juggling several jobs just to pay the bills wasn’t enough, if our fair city joining major metropoli on a list of some of the most unaffordable places in the country didn’t send a suitably loud warning, this week brings another sign that many Ashevillians face serious issues on the “making ends meet” front.
An excellent series in the Asheville Citizen-Times is bringing home the sharp point of our area’s multiple demons of low pay, a lack of housing and the increasing decay of the social safety net. At the end of people just not being able to pay their bills, at the end of an appalling lack of affordable housing is homelessness and desperation. And the situation is getting worse.
It’s an important read, because one of the many problems with over-focusing on the travails of summer millionaires or the latest complaint of wealthy “stakeholders” is that it can take awhile to realize the absolute, brutally obvious.
Low wages will break this city.
Not just create problems for the people going through them — though that’s bad enough — and not just increase homelessness and other social problems. A lack of decent pay will break Asheville as anything resembling a functioning city.
While Asheville has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, much of that growth has come from low-income service jobs that provide a level of income barely sufficient to eat and pay bills, and sometimes not even that. It’s not coincidence that family and youth homelessness have risen sharply as the ripple effect of low wages and unaffordable housing have hit.
This is a major problem, because it’s not business gurus or wealthy retirees purchasing their latest getaway that are the foundation of Asheville’s economy. It’s the rest of us in our thousands going out for a beer, saving up for a computer or having the funds to start something of our own. If we can’t do that, if most of our lives are consumed by a struggle to stay afloat, Asheville’s present — as well as its future — starts to break.
And New Age bromides about making one’s own reality and “quality of life” aside, people desperately wondering if their kids will go hungry don’t have time to think about much else.
It’s a testament to the toughness and ingenuity of our city’s population that some manage to fight their way out anyway, but the odds get steeper by the day.
The thing about steep odds is that they will wear down even the strongest person, over time, because they reduce life to an increasingly loaded series of dice throws. All it takes is luck running out a few times — a broken car, a trip to the emergency room, a burst pipe — and the ranks of the homeless add one more family, the numbers tick up, and Asheville’s foundation cracks.
So let’s cut the crud, because our culture here has to change. A business, corporate or local, that pays minimum wage isn’t helping the city or anyone in it. Ever. They’re not an asset; they’re a problem to be fought. This is the case no matter how many times “natural” shows up in their marketing or how often their owners have gone abroad to find enlightenment.
It’s useful to realize what the city would look like if every waiter and retail worker didn’t show up tomorrow, and consider that the “value” of their work is a great deal more than the people making their fortunes off it are paying.
And if Asheville wants a future, a raise is the place to start.
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