If you’re paid $11 an hour, you earn about $1,900 a month (before taxes and withholding). Meanwhile, the average apartment rent in Sonoma County is about $1,600 a month.
You’ll be OK, it seems, so long as you don’t need to put food on the table or pay for clothing and medical care for your kids.
During this past week, the political talk hereabouts concerned proposals that approach the problem of income and housing costs from different directions.
The Board of Supervisors is being pressed to establish a $15 minimum wage for employees of companies that do business with the county. And the Santa Rosa City Council is being urged to enact rent controls.
These proposals emerge from the belated recognition that tens of thousands of people in Sonoma County are scrambling to find housing and pay the rent — and it won’t be long before their travails undermine the hometown economy.
Not long ago, minimum-wage laws and rent controls wouldn’t have been a serious topic of conversation. Business people, landlords and economists can talk all day about the unintended consequences of government meddling in a market economy.
[For more of this story, written by Pete Golis, go to http://www.pressdemocrat.com/o...s-still-lots-of-talk]
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