Perhaps at no other time of the year is it clearer that elective self-denial is just another privilege of affluence. If you indulged in December without abatement, then you are likely to approach January with the intent to say no — to cheese, to craft beer, to Shake Shack, to cake doughnuts, to the braised short ribs you have perfected in an Instant Pot. You will stay home and make salads and eat undressed grains, and presumably the money you save will be spent on virtuous things.
During these exercises in asceticism you may often feel hungry, but in most cases you will not think about hunger in any broader or meaningful sense. This is not (necessarily) because you are cold and indifferent to the misfortunes of others.
Hunger as a defining symptom of poverty in the United States is rarely discussed, either at the level of engaged civilian conversation or as a political talking point. To do so would be to admit to a failure of democracy for which too many are to blame.
According to government statistics, 1 in 8 households in the United States is food insecure, meaning those households are unable to afford a consistent supply of nourishment throughout the year. In New York City, the number of people living with food insecurity has decreased during the past six years, but the figure is still higher — by 22 percent — than it was before the recession. In the Bronx, more than one-third of all children go hungry regularly.
On Jan. 1, the new minimum wage, set at $15 an hour, went into effect in New York City, and most companies employing more than 10 people have to pay it. The increase, considered a crucial step in the fight against poverty, is the result of a hard-fought grassroots organizing effort begun seven years ago and championed as a great victory by liberal politicians, even those who were initially not liberal enough to embrace it. But how much will the new standard do to alleviate some of the most punishing aspects of the city’s affordability crisis?
Last year, San Francisco and Seattle enacted a $15 minimum wage. Though both cities are also fantastically expensive, it is too soon to draw any comparison to New York, which presents its own challenges. (What we do know from a study examining the experiment in Seattle is that as wages increased on the path to $15 an hour, experienced workers benefited most from higher pay at the expense of reduced opportunities for workers with less experience.)
Buried under the relentless flood of news during the last months of 2018 was a report, sponsored in part by City Harvest, New York’s largest supplier of food to pantries and hunger charities that suggested less-than-optimistic predictions for what a new wage standard might achieve. The authors of the report calculated a self-sufficiency standard, meant to determine how much income is now required to meet basic needs — housing, child care, food, transportation, health care — without help from public subsidies, for families of different sizes living in different parts of the city.
The study found that more than 2 in 5 households in New York City lacked the income to cover necessities. And yet just a third of those households were considered poor by measures used by the federal government — measures typically used as qualifiers for certain kinds of public assistance and ones that do not account for family composition among many other variables.
You begin to understand some of the animosity directed at Amazon around its impending move to Queens, for example, when you see how much money is actually required to live there already, before housing prices are destined to be driven up even further by the company’s expansion. A single parent with two school-age children, for example would need to make nearly $69,427 a year, according to City Harvest’s Self-Sufficiency calculator. That amounts to an hourly wage of just under $33.
So to live comfortably enough in all but the most expensive quarters in Brooklyn, a two-parent family with two children would need to make about $70,000 a year, which would mean that each parent would need to earn just over $16 an hour. That figure accounts for the $433 the family would receive in child-related tax credits. All across the city, the cost of basic needs is rising faster for low-income families than conventional inflation metrics actually indicate. Also dispiriting is the fact that nearly a quarter of households that fall below the self-sufficiency standard include an adult with a bachelor’s degree.
What this tells us is that the arrival of a $15 hourly minimum wage cannot be considered the end of something. New York may be a city of self-invention, but it is not a city of self-sustenance. We are reminded of this every time we encounter the financial diary of a millennial — a new publishing subcategory — that breaks down expenses for rent and restaurants and Uber and so on and all too often reveals that a pair of parents in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Marin County, California, or somewhere, is supplementing the meager salary of a fashion or media hopeful.
In many, many cases, a $15 hourly wage will not bring a family, or even a single person, to an adequate living standard. That hardly means the fight was worthless; it just means the war is continuing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.