The Unseen Cost of a Growing City
A desperate letter from a laboring family illustrates the crushing reality of poverty in a booming Spokane, where basic survival was becoming an unreachable luxury.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In trying to live within our strictest economy, and still we are going behind in our accounts, we nursed two cases of typhoid fever without a doctor because we could not afford to have one. I am not a strong woman myself, being what some would term an invalid, therefore I am not able to put my shoulder to the wheel and help in supporting a large family, as some wives do. Still, I hire no outside help, and when the wife and mother fills the place of cook, laundress, seamstress and caretaker of the family, she is doing all she should, be she weak or strong. We do not ask for charity, nor do we want it. All we ask is for honest wages for honest work. When a business firm finds it is not making expenses it raises the price of its goods and gets it, too; but when the poor laboring man finds he is not making expenses and asks for a raise in the pay for his services the Chamber of Commerce and the business men raise their voices and cry aloud in protest. My husband is not a drinking man, and every cent he earns he spends right here in the city where we are trying to build a home. We wish to give our children a good education, but 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' We have saved and planned through two summers to take the family to Manito park for an outing and have not been able to do it yet.
“When a business firm finds it is not making expenses it raises the price of its goods and gets it, too; but when the poor laboring man finds he is not making expenses... the business men raise their voices and cry aloud in protest.”
This 1910 account of the 'high cost of living' crisis in Washington echoes today’s municipal struggles, where inflation consistently outpaces wage growth, forcing working families to choose between basic health care and essential needs like transit or recreation.
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