The American Dream offers you a basic deal: Even if you're just barely clinging on, if you work hard enough and long enough, you'll eventually be able to begin climbing the ladder toward the middle class, toward owning a home or a business.
But when Spokane resident Anastacia Howell and her family began climbing the ladder, the ladder started sinking. No sooner had her husband found a new job, one that paid a lot better, than her family's rent shot up by 50 percent.
"When already so much of your money and your income is going toward just having a place to have a roof over your head, it's just frustrating," Howell says. "Pointless."
Howell was pushing her husband to find a new job for a long time. His security job meant he had to work nights. He was getting minimum wage. He wasn't getting any benefits.
"He had to drive all over Spokane, to 50 different locations, just to kick out homeless people that already have nowhere to go," Howell says. "Excuse my language. I hated his f—-ing job ... It's a job that forces you to dehumanize people at their lowest point."
Because she's been at that point. Twice.
"Homelessness is not something I'm unfamiliar with," Howell says.
She was 17, sleeping under the bridges in Riverfront Park, when she and her boyfriend didn't have a friend's couch to crash on. She was 8, spending months with her mom in a Salvation Army shelter, cooped up in a cramped room with a bunk bed and no walls. Her mom was hoping to qualify for a SNAP program to pay for the medical bills for her little brother.
On the one hand, she had extremely strong feelings about her husband working a job kicking out people like her. On the other hand, his job was a necessity.
"You have to make sure your family is, you know, sheltered, safe and maintained," she says.
And she and her husband had done that. They had a place to live. First, they'd lived in her mother-in-law's garage. Then there'd been the repurposed storage room when the garage grew too cold. Then the studio apartment with the strange layout they got when their new baby made her mother-in-law's house too crowded.
Eventually, they landed at a three-bedroom apartment in Hillyard for only $800 a month.
And then, six months ago, she says, her husband finally snagged a new job — working customer service for a dental insurance company. Not only were they a "baseline-decent" employer, Howell says, they paid about $2 more an hour than her husband got working security. They celebrated by going to a movie for the first time in years.
"We were hopeful that we could actually build up a savings, so that we're not always peering over the edge," Howell says. "Because we're one crisis away from going over."
When you're no longer teetering on the edge, you can start looking toward the horizon. You start thinking about what you could do with your savings.
"Get a better car," Howell says. "Get one of us into schooling so that we could have a bit of upward momentum or even start saving up for a house."
She knows saving up for that downpayment for a house could take them a decade or longer.
"But you know: something," she says. "A goal to strive for."
That hope lasted about a month and a half. Then the rent increase hit. Her landlord sold her apartment to a larger company, and rumors flitted around the apartment complex. The only question was how much the increase would be.
The notice was taped to their door late last year: Their rent was spiking from $800 to $1,200. It effectively wiped away the raise her husband got by switching jobs.
"We inched away from the edge" of poverty, Howell says, "and then we were kind of pushed back."
She scoffs at Washington state bragging about its high minimum wage when it doesn't have any kind of rent control.
"I'm going to have to get a job, later on down the line," Howell says. "I'm going to have to do something drastic to get out of this position in poverty. I'm thinking about joining the Navy." ♦
