No offense, but $15 an hour @40hrs week is $31,200...I checked because I make more than that and work OT and have never been near 60
The other poster used a plural pronoun; thus, I think he was figuring two parents both working at this job. They'd have 60K combined for the family.
Try living in the deep south without ac. There are deaths every year from the heat in low income areas. A/C here is NOT a luxury. Heck if I had to make a choice, I would go without heat before I would go without a/c.
I've lived in the South all my life, and I grew up without air conditioning (we're talking 70s-80s). We had one attic fan in the middle of the house, and we had an oscillating tabletop fan in the kitchen. We survived. Sometimes we'd sleep out in lawn chairs in the field watching the stars. We never ate hot lunches during the summer, and we often had cold dinners as well.
I have also gone without heat. Personally, I'd give up the air conditioning first.
The people who literally die from lack of air conditioning tend to be the elderly who are in poor health. Healthy people can take the heat.
Also, while I was growing up, I never heard of anyone dying from the heat, but back then people spent the day on their porches and kept their windows open. I have the impression that these deaths tend to happen in places where people don't feel safe doing those things -- so they're faced with the choice of staying indoors in the unhealthy heat, or opening their doors and windows and opening themselves to the possibility of violence. Also, houses "back then" were built for the heat: They have high ceilings (because heat rises), and they have large windows placed for cross-ventilation. In the 70s, people started building with the assumption that air conditioning would be used; so rooms have windows on only one side, making furniture placement easier and ensuring privacy from neighbors.
And my personal experiences cause me to doubt the latter part of your statement. I know several low income families who have maintained inherited homes (that they could never hope to afford to buy) for decades. Maintaining a home costs a fraction of market rent so if they could afford any roof over their head they could afford to keep a house owned free & clear.
This was very common when I was growing up. I"m from a very rural area, where families tend to live on the same farm for generations.
I grew up in a farmhouse that'd been added onto multiple times. Many of my friends lived the same way: Maybe it'd been a 2-bedroomhouse, then someone'd made the attic into a bedroom so that an adult child could move in (with his family) to care for his elderly parents. Lots of these houses pre-date indoor plumbing, so houses often sport add-on bathrooms.
Oddities that you see in this type of house:
100 years or more ago, it was common for a man to add a "courting room" onto the front of his house when his daughters reached their teenaged years. Oddly enough, these were just rooms tacked onto the front of the house -- they aren't connected with a door to the inside, so you have to go out on the front porch to reach the courting room.
I've seen more than one old house with an attic bedroom reached via a ladder in the dining room.
It was common "back in the day" for a young couple to build themselves a "tall house". That meant they built the downstairs with a wide hallway. Once they had children (and presumably had saved more money), they'd install a stairway in the hall, and they'd add on upstairs bedrooms as they were needed. It was cheaper to build a "tall house" in the first place so that the exterior walls were in place.
I live in a high-income state and air conditioning is not typical, especially central air. There are million-plus homes that have a couple window units! I cannot relate to AC as a measure of poverty.
, I sure hope all this blaming the poor/low income for their situation makes everyone feel much better about themselves.
