COVID and the Working Poor

Here is my recent Op Ed in the Herald-Leader:

Start wherever you would like in your thinking about the disparate impacts of COVID-19 and you will always end up in the same place: we have too many people in our society who live too close to the margins, too many people who are liable to have their lives totally disrupted by any economic loss. COVID-19 shows us nothing new.

The extent and speed of the negative impact of COVID-19 simply forces us to see the human and economic costs the working poor have been paying all along. This acceleration also highlights the way we are all connected. When things get bad enough for enough of the people who are most vulnerable it affects everyone.

Take housing for example. Many people in our community are regularly at risk of eviction. When there are not too many evictions, landlords will find new tenants, they will be able to pay their mortgages, the banks and mortgage companies will make their profits, and the economy will roll merrily along for everyone except those who have been evicted.

COVID-19 reveals the structural problem inherent in our present system. Here in Lexington there could be as many as 1,700 families facing evictions now that the moratorium on evictions has expired. Nationally that number is estimated to be 30 million. For a moment leave aside the human misery caused by evictions and focus solely on the economics. Too many evictions results in too many vacant houses, which results in landlords unable to meet their mortgage obligations, which leads to defaults, which leads to banks taking losses.  Too many losses leads to the risk of bank insolvencies and the need for federal bail-outs to keep the economic merry-go-round going around.

We could solve the bulk of this problem by raising the minimum wage to a level that would make it possible for low-wage workers to afford decent, safe housing. Since we cannot raise the minimum wage at the local level we are left to rely on rescue and amelioration, with resources inadequate to meet the true need.

Unless we address the root problem at the state and national levels, when COVID-19 is under control the underlying weaknesses will remain, ready to wreak havoc at the next economic downturn. Too many people in our community lack sufficient resiliency to withstand these economic downturns. That leaves all of us in jeopardy.