We chose this housing crisis

Dear Editor, I agree with Tray DuClos' recent letter to VTDigger about Vermont's housing shortage. It is definitely a huge obstacle to our growth, no matter how you measure it, right up there with our fantastically high costs and our fantastically low wages. Yet we need to look beneath the surface issues such as zoning and ask ourselves a far more uncomfortable question: How and why did we create a society where people cannot afford to live where they work? This is not a natural phenomenon, like the 100-year floods that are hitting us every year or so now. We have deliberately done this to ourselves. We have deliberately made the math brutal. A typical working person makes somewhere around $15 to $20 an hour. It is not uncommon to see rents for a one-bedroom apartment around $1,200 to $1,500 a month. A $20-an-hour full-time worker earns about $3,467 a month before taxes. Rent of $1,500 consumes 43% of that gross income. At $15 an hour, rent consumes 58%. I am 71 years old and work two jobs. I still cannot afford these rental prices; were it not for public housing, I would be living on the streets. We have created these problems through deliberate business, political and social choices that consistently favor capital over labor. We celebrate rising property values, investment returns and so-called economic growth while treating workers' wages and housing as somebody else's problem. Then we complain that businesses cannot find workers. If we want to expand our economy to benefit all Vermonters, rather than the big donor class, we have to stop pretending that wages, rents, land prices and profits exist in separate worlds. This housing crisis is the predictable result of these deliberate choices. The deep question underlying all this is: Do we really want this kind of society? So far, the answer has been yes. Walter Carpenter Montpelier, Vt.