The PI Weighs In

This morning's Nickelsville PI Editorial, Ending Homelessness, A Broader Effort, gets a lot right, and the haters have already lined up to comment. Homelessness is a far larger problem than Seattle, based in three decades of rising inequality, bad federal housing policy, and growing economic insecurity for the majority of Americans. And, much could be gained if the Mayor and his people actually talked in good faith with Seattle's homeless advocates. Over the past year, their "dialogue" has brought a steady stream of victim-blaming rhetoric, political stonewalling of advocates, and systematic attacks upon those engaged in outdoor survival activity in the face of an inadequate emergency shelter system.

The Mayor's latest response to Nickelsville, which threatens all real and perceived allies of the encampment with fines, will only worsen an already poisonous situation, where unaccountable power does it's damnedest to crush a growing grassroots response to an unacceptable situation that is both dire and deteriorating.

Where they get it wrong is in dismissing Nickelsville as "posturing" by protesters toward the end of scoring "publicity points." This misunderstands the real need for a safe haven for the outdoor campers upon whom the city has declared war, and the equally real need, in the absence of any real possibility for productive dialogue, for poor people to fight back by any means necessary. Nickelsville is about survival, and for those of us who have been dehumanized and swept from visibility, the stakes could not be higher.

The federal and regional solutions that the PI editorial board calls for are essential to any real effort at solving homelessness, and the macro-economic causes of growing poverty must become a far higher priority for policymakers and advocates. No authentic progress on ending homelessness can occur without broad economic reform. The lip service these complex issues routinely receive must be replaced with strategic alliances that target root issues of racism, poverty, and an growing trend toward state-sponsored repression of the poor through increasingly brutal anti-homeless policies and mass incarceration.

In a declining economy, things are likely to become much worse for poor and homeless people. When concerns with Seattle's policy on homeless sweeps is routinely met by the city with hardball tactics and dismissive gestures, advocates are left with little alternative than to fight back with whatever pressure politics we can muster. We'd all be a lot better off if some middle ground might be found, in which the larger issues could be jointly addressed from a place of unified political power. This, however, isn't where we find ourselves. Anyone who's ever been in a schoolyard fight knows this much to be true. When a bully is on your back and your nose has been shoved into the dirt, your first priority is to turn the tables and get back on top.

Hope Is In The Air

When ordinary people start talking politics and change, you know something is happening out there. This morning, I stopped off to order new glasses on my way to work. The woman I was sitting with — we'll call her Evelyn — made small talk as she measured for fit. "So what are you doing today?" I told her I was on my way to work, and pointed to my Real Change hat, and she lit up and congratulated me for leading a life that matters.

"There's a lot of very vulnerable people out there," I said.

"I know," she said. "I have friends who work in public health, and they all say how little is available, and how hard it is to find the help people need."

"Yeah. From where they sit, it's pretty obvious how broken things are. But everyone is feeling more vulnerable. Inequality keeps widening, and middle-class people are being hit hard as well."

"It's all we talk about here," she said.

"Tell me about it."

"We have people working here who have families, and they're having a really hard time just keeping up on their house payments. I filled my tank this week and it was almost $50. Proctor & Gamble just announced that they were raising their prices 16% across the board. These are basics that you have to buy, and everything else is going up too. People are afraid of losing their homes."

""One of the things I always talk about is how we know how to solve homelessness because we've solved it before with the economic programs that kept the Hoovervilles from reappearing after the war. These were programs that built the middle class. Education through the GI bill. Public housing. FHA loans that fueled the housing boom. Public works programs to build infrastructure. An agreement between government, big business, and labor that no one would be too greedy and that supporting the public good was a mutual goal. This led to thirty years of declining inequality and steady economic growth. Now, we've had thirty years of growing inequality, and people have been pushed about as far as they can go."

She looked at me through the large, squarish, peach frames that perfectly accented her auburn hair and attractive slightly rounded face.

"And now," she said, talking faster, "they're starting to go after things like free speech. The things that make America America. They can't let go of power, and everyone's on the make." She paused. "And it's both Democrats and Republicans."

"Yeah. It's a corrupt culture, and everybody knows it. Although I have to say that I'm throughly enjoying Ted Stevens in Alaska. He's what, 84? End of the road dude!"

She laughed and looked at my paperwork. "How old are you?"

"47"

"Well, I'm 57. And I know how things change. I was going to the marches and protests in high school, and we changed things. There was the women's movement, and what happened with blacks. We protested and organized and things moved."

"That's what I think is so important about Obama," I offered. "He's a politician, but he understands the role of citizens' movements. He creates hope and raises expectations. Richard Nixon was a law & order conservative Republican, but by today's standards, his Great Society program was practically socialism. And it was because of the social movements you're talking about. When the pressure builds from below, politicians have to respond."

She offered to clean up my glasses and disappeared for a moment to the back. When she returned, she sat across the small table and looked into my smudge free lenses. "You know, people feel small. They feel bad about themselves when they think they're not making it. But now, they're getting mad."

"I think this is what happens. For awhile, people think it's about their own failure. And then they start looking around and see that no one else is really making it either, and that it's the system that's failing. It's harder and harder to hold onto being middle class, much less become middle class. People are starting to push back."

"People are barely hanging on," she said. "No one has any savings. There's no margin for error anymore, and people are scared. It's all we talk about."

We were wrapping up. It was time to go.

"I'm hearing these conversations everywhere," I said. "At bus stops. In thrift stores. Over in fruit & vegetables at the supermarket. Everywhere."

"So am I," she said.

"Things are changing. It's in the air."

"Thanks Tim," she smiled. "You've made my day."

The End of the Middle Class

Author, economist and New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman discusses the history of the American "middle class," and argues that growing income inequality may threaten its existence.

Where We're Going To

A friend who lives near Astoria, Oregon sent an email yesterday asking how spontaneous I felt. "If you get in your car by 1," she said, "you'll be here around 4:30 and can BBQ with me and my neighbors in this great garden. There's a creek just behind the garden and we can walk to the beach." I felt spontaneous. I girled up the twins with dresses and clean hair and we drove. The beach near her house was spectacular. You could see Haystack a few miles down the coast, jutting up out of the water like some sort of a forbidden island.

As we drove through the neighborhood, she pointed out some of the large, beautiful, and seasonally occupied homes owned by the wealthy while she described the hard scrabble existence of many locals. It was an apt metaphor for an economy where the top 5% bask in excess while most of us work harder and with less result just to stay even.

A recent state-by-state report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the acceleration of income inequality confirms what anyone can see.

Low- and middle-income families have reaped few gains since the late 1990s, despite the recent years of economic prosperity. Average incomes actually fell by 2.5% for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale and rose by just 1.3% for those in the middle fifth. Meanwhile, incomes climbed 9% for those in the top fifth.

“Before the recent downturn hit, our economy was generating solid income gains. The problem was that high levels of inequality meant these gains failed to reach middle- and low-income families, whose living standards stagnated or even declined,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the report. “As we head into an economic downturn, these families are ill-prepared to weather the storm.” ...

Within the top fifth, the lion’s share of the income growth of the past two decades went to those at the very top. In the 11 states large enough to permit this calculation, the incomes of the top 5 percent of families rose by more than $90,000 on average. This is greater than the income growth of the top fifth of families as a whole in these states — and dwarfs the income growth among the bottom fifth of families in these states. The average income of the richest 5 percent of families is now more than 12 times that of the poorest families.

Since the 90's in Washington State, average income for the bottom quintile fell by 4.2%, while the top quintile's income grew by 11.8%. Income growth for the middle is stagnant.

Measured over the last two decades the gap is even more striking. While incomes rose for the bottom fifth by 5.5%, they rose for the top fifth by an incredible 41.3%. These numbers are adjusted for inflation and do not include capital gains income. The real picture, then, is even more extreme, especially when you look at incomes for the upper range of the top 5%, which are growing faster than anyone's.

These are just statistics. Where you see the real damage is in places like Astoria, where prime real estate gets snatched up as an investment/amenity for the rich while locals struggle with the resulting inflation. Or Seattle, where a downtown condo boom has sparked a war on the visible poor in this once liberal city.

My friend was right about the drive. It took about three and a half hours to get there. Going home, I wasn't so lucky. I took a wrong turn in Astoria and wound up driving to Seattle by way of Portland. At around 2:30 a.m., a major accident on I-5 near Tacoma brought all five lanes to a standstill for more than half an hour. Rich and poor alike sat in their cars, watching a sea of flashing lights as one ambulance after another crept by in the breakdown lane.

As a State Trooper finally waved us through the single lane that eventually opened, I pondered the accident as overly-stretched metaphor for the middle-class. Here we are, bystanders on a road that seems to have no exit. Unspeakable horror looms. The girls slept in the backseat, unaware of what was ahead. And meanwhile, there we all sat, resigned and stuck in place, not going anywhere ourselves.

The Big Squeeze

Help Us Build a Strong Movement
for Economic Justice in Seattle and Beyond
Since 1973, income disparity in America has steadily grown. The homelessness that began in the seventies and exploded into crisis over the next decade has become a fixture of our economic and civic lives. Over this period, the majority of us have experienced increased economic vulnerability.

Private charity and local government alone are poorly equipped to fix a system that consistently produces greater levels of inequality. Real solutions to economic injustice require us to build alliances across our differences and organize for power.

America has a growing poverty class that is characterized by vulnerability to housing loss. For many, access to this most basic of human needs is out of reach entirely. Recent federal funding priorities have shifted resources away from family and rural homelessness to address the problem of the “chronically homeless,” a population that represents approximately ten percent of those who lack housing. These priorities deflect attention from issues of poverty and inequality by presenting homelessness as mostly a problem of individual dysfunction, as opposed to being the result of deliberate policy decisions that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the majority.

Meanwhile, income and wealth disparity have returned to pre-1930s levels, with wealth inequality leading the way. As government has become more beholden to the corporate interests that operate within a globalized economy, the fortunes of all but the most affluent twenty percent have largely declined.

The richest one percent — who now enjoy one-hundred-ninety times the wealth of the median American household — have done best of all. One in one hundred households hold an average of $14.8 million in assets, while median family wealth stands at just $82,000.

Working and middle class people have been hit hard. As wealth in the United States transfers upward, the very commodities that offer a toehold in the American Dream — healthcare, housing, and quality education — have risen most dramatically in cost.

Low-income people of color have been hit hardest of all. Infant mortality rates and unemployment disparity in minority communities are again on the rise after years of improvement. Incarceration trends that disproportionately target African-Americans have led to reduced economic opportunities and a deepening racialization of poverty. People of color have long been disproportionately at risk of homelessness.

While payday and sub-prime lenders prey upon the most vulnerable, debt is an experience that most of us share. More than fifty million Americans have negative assets. In other words, many of us now owe more than we own.

We are working more jobs and longer hours, and the margin for error has become increasingly thin. While most of us will not become homeless, many will come close.

Homelessness, heightened inequality, and ever-deepening debt are not the inevitable by-product of blind market forces. As corporate interests have largely captured the democratic process, our money-driven politics have ceased to serve the common good.

The divisions that exist within the national economy are easily seen in the new Seattle downtown. Within just a few blocks — near Pike Place Market, Benaroya Hall, and the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum — four luxury towers will add 505 new condos with an average value of $2.2 million each.

As the cost of housing in Seattle and our City’s median income grow further apart, homelessness and economic vulnerability have increased.

A home in Seattle now costs nearly eight times the Seattle median income. This ratio has widened by thirty-nine percent since 2000. Average rent rose by more than ten percent last year to reach an all time high of $1,052.

Rental vacancies are below three percent. Those who have poor credit or other problems are often unable to compete for scarce affordable market-rate apartments. Waiting lists for Seattle’s 20,800 subsidized units — a number that includes federally supported Section 8 housing vouchers — are typically one to three years long.

The new popularity of urban living can be seen in the proliferation of construction cranes throughout the downtown. Forty-nine new condo projects are scheduled for completion in this area by 2010. Drawn by the cultural amenities of the city and the attractions of a short commute, 23,000 people have moved to Seattle since 2000. Condo conversion alone has led to the loss of nearly 5,000 rental units in the past three years. More than two thirds of these were affordable to those at eighty percent of median income or below.

Despite the construction boom, Seattle leads the Puget Sound region in work that doesn’t pay. One in four people in our city earn less than a living wage. This has been defined as pay that “allows families to meet their basic needs, without public assistance, and that provides them some ability to deal with emergencies and plan ahead.” For King County, this has been calculated at $28 an hour for a family of three with a single wage earner, or $12 an hour for a single adult.

Local growth in high wage jobs such as computer programmer or software engineer are more than matched by an expanding low wage sector of clerks, janitors, and sales personnel. Nearly seventy percent of the 240,000 jobs added in Washington State between 2002 and 2006 paid below eighty percent of median income.

Given the failure of wages to keep pace with the cost of housing, it is not surprising to find homelessness on the rise. The 2008 street homeless One Night Count, organized by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, found 2,631 people surviving outside of an overcrowded system of shelter and transitional housing. This represents a 15% countywide increase over the previous year. A comparison of areas counted in Seattle this year and last yields a sobering 18% increase in street homelessness.

As the demographics of urban living have shifted toward those who can afford it, extreme poverty has become increasingly criminalized. Expanded anti-panhandling legislation, bans on public feeding, a rise in private security forces hired by and accountable to downtown interests, prohibitions on car camping, and sweeps of homeless campsites are all typical strategies to reduce visible homelessness in cities across America.

Despite the clear evidence that the basic survival needs of Seattle’s homeless are not being met, the City has recently defined all camping and storage of personal items on public property as “unauthorized” and illegal. A policy of general tolerance — with campsite clearances triggered by a pattern of neighborhood complaints — has given way to regularly scheduled sweeps of known encampments.

These new policies criminalize survival while offering little to no real assistance to those who are displaced. No Trespass citations bar campers from public property and result in criminal charges when violated. Clearance crews are directed to immediately dispose of all survival gear — tarps, sleeping bags, blankets, and tents — that remain in areas where 48-hour clearance notices are posted.

This has little or nothing to do with Seattle’s commitment to ending homelessness, and merely deepens the misery of those who have the least.

A Seattle economic justice agenda must promote housing affordability and economic opportunity while recognizing the right of homeless people not just to survive, but also to secure the help they desperately need.

Homelessness is the extreme end of a growing continuum of economic vulnerability. It is in our mutual self-interest to protect those who suffer most while we work together to restore economic democracy.

Download the Real Change 2007 Annual Report here. The photo of the Fifteen Twenty-One ("designed exclusively for the confident few") over on Second Ave where the Green Tortoise used to be is Revel Smith

Sources:
The Race for Wages: Livable Wage Jobs in the Current Economy, Northwest Federation of Community Organizations. December, 2007
A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities, National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. January 2006.
Skills Required: Preparing Puget Sound for Tomorrow’s Middle Wage Jobs, Seattle Jobs Initiative. March, 2008
The State of Working America 2006/2007, Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org)
The Squandering of America, Robert Kuttner, Knopf, 2008.
Locked Out, a web only American Prospect interview with Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America. December 5, 2006.
Affordable Housing Action Agenda, Seattle Planning Commission Report. Feb., 2008.
Summary of the 2008 Unsheltered Homeless Count in Selected Areas of King County, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness. January, 2008
United Way King County Community Assessment (www.uwkc.org)

The Rich Are Giving More ... To Themselves

Call it a sign of the times. As the chasm between rich and poor yawns wider and wider, with the folks in the middle for the most part falling, certain institutional realities have taken hold. The New York Times reported earlier this month that private cash is setting the agenda for urban infrastructure. Apparently, as our bridges and roads and such are crumbling because government has gone broke with war and handing bundles of unmarked bills to the rich, institutions like Yale are flush with cash and spending like drunken Ivy league frat boys.

The message in this outburst of activity, here and in other places across the country, is that private spending, supported handsomely by a growing number of very wealthy families, is gaining ground on traditional public investment. In the case of New Haven, once the recipient of more federal dollars per person for urban renewal than any other city, private investment now far surpasses public outlays.

“For us,” the mayor said, “infrastructure spending has come to mean growing the university. Yale has the money, and what they get from us is the approval to grow.”...

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that government should be spending $320 billion a year over the next five years — double the current outlay — just to bring up to par what already exists.

Meanwhile, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports the following:

Even as many wealthy nonprofit institutions — like museums and universities — are reporting record increases in contributions, other charities, especially those that provide direct services to the poor, are struggling to get donations and keep up with rapidly escalating demands for aid. Some veteran leaders of organizations that serve the needy say they have not faced such a tough time before in their nonprofit careers.

Why? Well, as it turns out, most people aren't doing so well, and the people who are tend to give to their own.

“There are two tiers of income, and donors are in one tier or the other,” says Melissa S. Brown, associate director of research at Indiana University Center on Philanthropy. “Charities with donors in the top tier see big increases, and nonprofits whose donors are squeezed by lost income are feeling the pain.” ...

Colleges, hospitals, arts organizations, community foundations, and other wealthy institutions have in the past decade built their endowments and reserves to insulate themselves from economic fluctuations. In addition, such organizations have been hiring many new fund raisers to focus exclusively on seeking big gifts from wealthy people.

And wealthy donors overwhelmingly prefer those types of institutions: A study released this month of more than 8,000 gifts of $1-million or more to 4,000 nonprofit organizations found that the largest share of those dollars, 44 percent, went to higher education, followed by hospitals and other medical institutions (16 percent), and arts and cultural organizations (12 percent). Social-service groups received just 5 percent of the dollars, according to the study by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research.

A bit further down in the article comes this news from LA on how the homeless are doing.

Other charities in Los Angeles are facing an even tougher time. Beyond Shelter, a Los Angeles charity that has focused on moving homeless families out of emergency shelters and into permanent homes, is struggling to meet payroll next month while trying to help a homeless population that has exploded in size in the past two years, according to Tanya Tull, the charity’s president.

Ms. Tull says she has watched government support decline, while foundations that provided support in the past are making smaller and smaller grants to her charity because they are deluged with requests from other social-service groups.

“Every agency we speak to is turning families away, and the shelters have been full all year,” she says. “I am seeing families with children sleeping in their cars, riding the bus all night, sitting in fast-food restaurants, just to have a place to be. This is a very, very sad thing to experience, after so many years when we thought we were getting a handle on the problem.”

In her 25 years of working with the homeless, Ms. Tull says, “this is the worst I have ever seen in terms of the numbers of homeless families and the fact that the safety net is gone.”

What's this? I recently read that Los Angeles has halved their downtown homeless problem through a creepy combination of repressive policing and high-tech legerdemain. I guess that stuff doesn't really work. Oh, wait, she's talking about homeless families. They don't count.

The rich are having a big party, and we get to come and eat cake. No wait ... the cake's all gone. All they're serving now is crumbs.

Charity Kicks Justice's Ass: Rich Throw Party

Tonight I was poking around at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' website looking for some decent poverty trend data. They've done a pretty thorough job of chewing over the 2006 census info and a few other things, and the news isn't great.

• In 2006, both the number and the percentage of Americans who are uninsured hit their highest levels since 1999, the first year for which comparable data are available, with 2.2 million more Americans — and 600,000 more children — joining the ranks of the uninsured in 2006.
• While median income rose modestly (by 0.7 percent, or $356) for households in general, this merely brought median income back to where it stood in the 2001 recession year. In addition, median income for working-age households — those headed by someone under 65 — remained more than $1,300 below where it stood when the recession hit bottom.
• New Commerce Department data shows that the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to 1929. The share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record.
• Other new data shows that income concentration, which increased in 2003 and rose sharply in 2004, jumped again in 2005. The share of pre-tax income in the nation that goes to the top 1 percent of households increased from 17.8 percent in 2004 to 19.3 percent in 2005. Only four times since World War II has the percentage of income received by the top 1 percent risen this much in a single year (in percentage point terms). One of those four times was 2004.
• In the belaboring the obvious department, detailed new tax data shows that the federal tax system has become much less progressive over the past several decades, particularly during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Over the same several decades, pre-tax income inequality has grown as well. Thus, during a period in which economic forces have been generating increased pre-tax inequality, changes in the tax system have exacerbated rather than mitigated the widening of the income gap.

But hey, no need to worry. Americans are getting involved! According to The Corporation for National and Community Service,

Americans over the age of 16 are volunteering at historically high rates, with 61.2 million giving their time in 2006 to help others by mentoring students, beautifying neighborhoods, restoring homes after disasters, and much, much more. Although the adult volunteer rate for 2006, 26.7%, was down slightly from the 28.8% recorded from 2003-2005, a greater percentage of Americans adults are volunteering today than at any other time in the past 30 years.

And we have reason to be especially proud, because Seattle, despite our rapidly increasing income inequality and all of it's consequences for our city, is number five in the nation in volunteering, lagging only behind Austin, TX, Omaha, NE, Salt Lake City, UT, and, in the number one spot, the home of Mary Tyler Moore, Minneapolis, MN.

Also, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness has found the next best thing to Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, and it's Project Connect, a corporate friendly volunteer fest that brings resources and homeless people together to show what can happen when people roll up their sleeves and get to work. Their website now highlights a recent Project Connect in Springfield, MA, attended, of course, by Mr. Philip Mangano, and just look at these outcomes:

• 5 veterans were housed

• 351 applications for Section 8 and public housing were completed

• 141 people received housing counseling

• 76 Massachusetts IDs issued (paid for by the corporate donations)

• 76 birth certificates ordered (paid for by the corporate donations)

• 250 bus tickets issued

• 70 dental screenings

• 21 medical examinations, with 43 follow-up medical appointments made

• 131 chair massages

• 41 foot washes

• 60 haircuts

• 50 pairs of eyeglasses ordered

• 29 Social Security/SSI applications

• 49 MassHealth/Commonwealth Care applications

• 29 veterans benefits applications

• 229 employment & training contacts

• 90 people received legal advice

• 150 people received consumer information and advice

• 21 people received immigration advice

• 65 people made phone calls

• 55 children cared for at the on-site child care center

• 600 children's books given away

And some people say we don't have homelessness on the run!

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the more volunteerism and charity we have, the further we get away from a vision of what social justice looks like, and the more we become a society of haves and have-nots where people are too afraid, tired, hopeless, bought off, or just plain stupid to fight for anything more to the point. Charity makes the radical inequality we've grown accustomed to a bit easier to swallow, because we get to show we care.

The Problem(s) of the Rich

The 2005 census figures were released last March and show that inequality is at its highest since the Roaring Twenties. The top one percent of the population, or 300,000 people, showed the same income as the entire bottom fifty percent, or 150,000,000 people.

That's a one to five-hundred average income ratio between the bottom half of the population and the top one percent.

You'd think the well off (annual household income for the top 5% starts at $166,000) would be pretty grateful for what they have. But you'd be wrong.

If this blog by Tim, the million dollar condo owner at 2200 Westlake is at all representative, they're still not happy, and they fear and hate anything or anyone that might impinge upon the unbridled enjoyment of their privilege.

Tim's problems include poor people, sketchy-looking art school students, and substandard concierge service. He also whines about having to bus his own table at the Wholefoods bistro, and needing to walk two blocks to get to a Subway sandwich shop.

He unfavorably compares Cornish students to WTO protesters and says, "If you're paying a million dollars for your condo, you don't want to feel guilty every time you drive your BMW by these starving artists while they mentally break your car's windshield with their bedazzled painted baseball bats."

Bedazzled painted baseball bats?

Tim is also threatened by the "riff-raff homeless," who he says "belong either in one of these 3 places: 1. Mental institution, 2. Rehab facility, 3. Job training center." They do not, he says "belong on the street where they are a menace to society and unproductive."

Condo owners, he says, need to band together to get their own security to manage the riff-raff, because the police are "useless."

Round 'em up. Take 'em away.

Here is the hard edge of extreme privilege. If the other high-end condo owners that are flooding into the downtown over the next five years are anything like this guy, we can predict heightened class warfare well into the next decade, and it won't be the poor who are taking up arms.

The Plight of the Barely Affluent

Today I was thinking about how few people in the United States are really making it. Between the ridiculous cost of housing, energy prices, the price of childcare and education, and a medical system that has become completely irrational, nearly everyone is challenged to make ends meet.

My own household is a case in point.

We do better than most. We're both college educated. Forty-six and forty-three. My wife has a Master's Degree in Social work. She works for the county and has excellent family benefits. I've headed the same non-profit for 13 years, and earn exactly the median income for Seattle, which is $52K. Last year, between our primary work and some minor side income, we earned $111,401. We paid 8.72% of our income to the federal government in taxes.

This places us well inside the top quintile of family income in the United States, which begins at $88,030. Having two income earners makes us typical of those households in the top two quintiles. We have twin four year olds, making us a 4 person family. The graphic at left shows U.S. income distribution represented as a 30 story building. Our household would live somewhere around the 28th floor.

Those next two floors must be real doozies.

We have what we need. Healthcare. Housing. Enough food. Broadband internet, a gym membership at Bally's, and a subscription to Netflix. The graphic at right represents income distribution in the United States as a peanut butter sandwich. We have scaled the US class ladder to what are dizzying heights. And yet, it doesn't seem like quite enough.

Everyday, for example, lunch at work is the same grilled chicken and bell pepper with kashi grains microwave dinner from Costco. Sometimes I go for the teriyaki bowl. They cost around $2.30 each. With two four-year-olds and both parents working, who has time to cook?

The girls are in a Montessori daycare, which costs close to $1,700 a month. We skip the frills like dance and swim lessons, and buy all their clothes at thrift stores. We leave the Gymboree bullshit to those higher on the peanut butter pinnacle than ourselves.

Our beige carpet is more of a mottled brown. Renting a steam vac runs about $50 a pop, so I try and only do it around three times a year.

We have no cable TV. The girls watch cartoons on PBS, and I watch Lawrence Welk on Saturdays. Despite the allure of James Taylor, Roy Orbison, and the Mamas and the Papas, we do not contribute to public television.

We have a 19 year old cat who pees on our bed once or twice a week. We'd have him put down, but we don't have the $200, so instead, we wait.

The 97 Accord wagon isn't seeming quite as new as it did a few years ago.

Our second car, a '94 Toyota Corolla, just got its third cracked front windshield this year. We're unlucky that way. That'll be $200. We also need to fix the brakes and flush the transmission. The maintenance will cost more than the car is worth. We'll do it anyway, because at least it's paid for.

These are the sorts of things that put us another $500 or so in credit card debt each month. This is where the tax return goes. This year we got about $1,500 off our taxes for being homeowners, and another $1,200 in daycare credit. We'll get about $3,700 back, bringing the debt down to a manageable $2-3K.

Each week, I get around 3-4 offers to refinance the house, and another 2-3 loan offers for $30-50K at attractive interest rates. Apparently, bankers see our relatively low income-to-debt ratio and see great untapped potential.

We have no savings. At 46, I have no retirement plan. My first 35 years or so were more or less spent in poverty, so social security isn't looking too lucrative just yet. Our 1,080 square foot house, which we bought in Shoreline two years ago for $252,000, should be paid off in 2035. I'll be 70.

Zillow says our house is worth $306,000 now. That's a bit better than 10% appreciation a year. We should probably feel like we made a wise investment, but I mostly feel like I'm shoveling money to a mortgage broker. Most of what we pay each month is interest.

At this rate, by the time I'm 70, our little '52 rambler of a house will be worth well over $1,000,000, and I'll achieve my lifelong dream of retiring as a millionaire. If, instead, the housing market crashes, we'll be debt slaves like everyone else. Woo-hoo!

And this is the view from the 28th floor. I hate to whine, but seriously, if this is affluence, it kind of sucks.