My original intent was to write a story about the income, and racial inequality in the city of Pontiac, but after seeing the general price of housing across Oakland County I wanted to gather some opinions on the topic across a few demographics. My assumption would be that working class folks being forced to live in worse areas on account of housing prices wouldn't sit particularly well. The housing costs vary radically between different cities. Median gross rent in the city of Birmingham is around $1,400 while in Waterford it's only about $870 per month and in Pontiac [one of few cities with a Housing Commission] it drops to about $800 per month. So, I set out on social media to see for sure.
To gather the data, I set up a Google Form [and interpreted it with Google Sheets] with some basic questions about the recipient's housing situations [number of occupants, price of rent/mortgage etc] and a single short answer question at the end of the survey. I expected the data to be a bit bias, considering that the majority of my connections on social media skew younger and more blue collar. I was genuinely surprised by the vehemence with which the survey was responded to.
The overwhelming majority of respondents believe that housing in its current form is too expensive, and that landlords are for lack of a better term, parasites. One respondent said: "... Landlords are by nature unethical and need to be abolished," while another provided a scathing analogy to scalpers at a sporting event. Another surprising detail was the largest group of respondents from a single city were from Pontiac nearly all of them lived there because of price.
Less than one third of the respondents lived with their families, and all independent respondents were employed with at least one job, several noted in their responses that they were holding up multiple part time jobs to afford housing.