This whole issue is completely different from what it was only a few years ago. And nothing like it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Our whole region is in a catastrophic housing crisis. There is an extreme shortage of decent 3-bedroom apartments, so much so that the cost to rent them in places with no rent control has nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Income has barely increased in the same time period. Who needs these apartments --- families with children.
Even if minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour, that's still only about $30,000 a year. You can't qualify to rent anything with that income. And some people want to keep minimum wage at $8-something. The whole situation is absurd.
There's just a total disconnect. You can survive on public assistance, and you can survive making $75,000 a year. In the middle, you can't survive.
How is a family of 4 to survive making $45,000. You can't. It's impossible. Just run a basic household budget, and you'll see that a family of four can't really survive making less than $60,000. And that's if your situation is PERFECT. If you have credit card debt, alimony or child support payments, medical debt, you are underwater.
Almost all of our public policy makers are older people who own homes and have good income. They have no clue what's going on out there, how people are squeezed into oblivion. But when their son or granddaughter decides to move from NJ to flyover country, the realization starts to set in. There's just no future here. Our region is for the rich and it's for the poor. Anyone else is smart to get out.