Second, this is for the whole Seattle/Tacoma area. This isn’t living in central Seattle.
Finally, I found it to be generous from my personal experience. My partner and I were able to live in Seattle for considerably less than $60k per year this gives for two people. We had a perfectly happy, frugal, life at around $36k.
There's a tendency for people to think that anyone not living in a house with a white picket fence in Queen Anne must be insufferable.
It seems like there's a large group of people that is simply miserable if they don't have as much as others - regardless of if that thing is going to actually bring them any joy or not.
It seems like half my friends are killing themselves to buy a boat - and they don't even go out boating more than a couple times a year. I'll never get it.
As a kid in the 80s we owned close to nothing. But nobody did and we just made the best of it. I never felt poor because this simply was the living standard of the time and our objective needs were met.
It seems since then we simply invented a whole lot of extra "needs", which really are "wants".
This stuff is so general as to be basically worthless beyond a comparison between areas, not as a datapoint to use when calculating the cost of living somewhere.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/42660
> Typical Expenses > > 1 Adult > > Housing > > $18,388
I'm talking about just the housing, it looks like the number you're talking about is total expenses.
> Second, this is for the whole Seattle/Tacoma area. This isn’t living in central Seattle.
Okay that makes more sense. You can definitely get studios for $1.5k with utilities in e.g. Renton or Kent.
$1.5k is actually really high. The median rent according to Zillow, for just Seattle, is $2.3k and that’s all sizes of apartments.
I’m suspicious of the claim here that this is minimal living costs, not closer to median cost.
$1.5k with $100-$200 of utilities, renters insurance, etc in Seattle proper gets a little more difficult to find. You could probably do it up north past greenwood, over in west seattle, or similar. If you know how to dodge the craigslist scams haha.
I guess ideologically I don’t think “living wage” corresponds to 40th percentile