It is completely possible to survive on a minimum wage job in many cities across the country. It isn’t luxurious, it isn’t fair, and it certainty isn’t ideal, but exaggerating the facts to make a sociopolitical point only makes the opposition have a stronger foothold.
I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people
> The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.
http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet
"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."
Demographic shifts are weird, man.
I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.
It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.
Meaning just over half live in the rest, with far lower cost of living.
Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.
The average American lives in a fairly considerable city, depending on your definition of "large." The vast majority live in cities of 100,000 or more.
Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs. For perspective, the #100 MSA is Fort Wayne, Indiana, at roughly 500,000 people.
Not to mention, struggling to make rent, homelessness, and poverty don't just vanish when you step away from the most expensive cities.
Living in "Santa Luna" (which I assume was actually Santa Cruz) instead of the suburbs where he worked didn't make his rent affordable in 1994, and it certainly wouldn't today, in 2020.