My SO and I make roughly $6k a month, and yea it feels better than only making $18/hr, but rent goes up several hundred dollars a year. Just in the last 4 months, it went up by $400. There are no laws that regulate rent increase in Nevada.
I cannot fucking fathom what we would do if I was still making $18/hr, but if I was single I would have thought long and hard about killing myself.
I looked at the rent for my hometown. It’s much higher of course, and the space is literally 2-3x smaller for the same or fewer bedrooms.
I am almost 40, so this wage honestly still feels completely like shit.
You’re thinking “But dude you could buy a new gaming PC every few months if you really wanted to.”
Yea I could, but guess what? If I want to buy a home, I’m going to need 20% down, and trust me when I say that the climate in Vegas is completely unlivable, but with my credit they’ll probably want 40% down at the worst interest rate for all I know.
AND, housing in Vegas is shooting up every few months.
AND, the ENTIRE fucking lake dried up, AND I never saw much fucking water behind the Hoover Dam 5 years ago, so I bet that’s almost dried up to. We have almost zero humidity, and it feels like shit.
Some of you were born in this god awful state, and you think you acclimated to the shitty humidity and the exponentially higher amount of dust particles per breath of air you take. No you didn’t. Because I was born outside of Nevada, in a city with livable humidity, cleaner air, and cleaner water. I can see it on your skin. I can see it in your brains, the way how everyone who lives here, EVERYONE, literally behaves like they are constantly dehydrated but too fucked up to realize it. You’re decaying and dying faster by living here. I am so much more aware of it because I felt it since the first day I moved here. And I can feel it even more now thanks to all our bodies of water totally disappearing.
Humidifiers don’t do jack shit when the entire rest of the fucking city is a dry desert wasteland.
So then you tell me, well save up to buy a home in your hometown in California. You mean save up $300,000 minimum to put down on a house? I’ll be nearly fucking retired by that time.
$40/hr is already a few years away from being a poverty wage.
I moved to Vegas 10 years ago, and rent was less than half of what it is today. Plenty of houses and 2 bedroom apartments were under $1000 a month. Homes were $150-200k. California was still $1 million.
True story. We went to view an externally nice looking house that has been available to rent for a few months. 2 months. It looked like it was flooded daily, both floors. To say it might have mold is an understatement. The walls and counters were cracked and peeling. This is how they presented it, at $2000 a month, because they know some unlucky person will have no choice between that and a $2000/month 2 bedroom apartment. Oh but apartment amenities must be nice right? You mean the pools that close before you get home from work? The hot tub that is always broken and the parts are always back-ordered. The “gym room”, if you can even call it that. What amenities?
They’re also charging extra fees from each unit to pay for maintenance of the amenities. WHAT maintenance?
In several more years I’ll be 40, I might finally make 100k a year myself and my girlfriend might make almost as much with our hopefully better job titles…. But we’ll be 40, and it will still be a poverty wage in my hometown. We will be 40 and we won’t be young anymore, and it will be 20 years since I left my hometown because I couldn’t afford to live there.
One of our dogs suffered a whole night all of a sudden, and we were sleeping and we finally woke up to it crying in pain, and could not save it, when we were making less money and couldn’t afford the surgery that the Las Vegas Vets refused to give without a full payment.
It is too little, too late, for either of us to ever be happy again. What will we do as we get older to cope? Buy more shit? Nothing is entertaining anymore when your body feels like it’s constantly losing its daily battles with pollution and contamination and time. No good memories to look back on can make up for the decades we struggled to FINALLY not be at rock bottom poverty levels, especially when inflation will make our wages poverty wages again in a few years, especially in places that actually have livable environments.
East coast, mid west, north, south, this entire fucking country sucks except for the few cities in California, Washington, and Colorado that everyone wants to move to, but they’re all so unfathomably unaffordable even if I doubled my wage again, because inflation isn’t just increasing, it’s ACCELERATING.
When the cost of rent goes up $200-300 a year, then $400 a year, then $500 the next year, all of you people graduating college and becoming doctors and software engineers are going to be fucked by the property management giants that will SEE your wages and adjust their cost of rent high enough to where you can barely afford it but still qualify. Meanwhile everyone else still making under $50/hr will be living in those 20 story 10’ x 10’ studio apartments with unmaintained shared community bathrooms.
We spent our entire youth in poverty, and we and our families and friends, and pets, all suffered because our employers REFUSED TO TREAT US LIKE FUCKING HUMAN BEINGS AND PAY US FAIRLY FOR THE HOURS WE WASTED AWAY TO MAKE THEM FILTHY RICH.
TO ALL MY LANDLORDS AND SHITTY EMPLOYERS, I WILL NEVER FORGET WHO ANY OF YOU ARE, AND YOU WILL SEE THE DAY WHEN WE ALL MAKE YOU PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO ALL OF US. YOU ARE THE ONES RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OUR SUFFERING, AND YOU WILL EXPERIENCE FAR WORSE BEFORE YOU DIE. THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS FOR THE TIME LOST AND ALL THE SUFFERING THAT YOU CAN NEVER FIX.