Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee the right to housing

Contention 2: Counter Plan

Observation One: Competition

This counter plan competes through net-benefits. While it would be possible to implement a guaranteed right to housing AND a living wage, it would be undesirable to do both of these proposals at the same time. The Counterplan will be better than either the plan, or the permutation.

Observation 2: Solvency

The Universal Living Wage will end economic homelessness for over one million minimum wage workers and prevent Economic homelessness for 20.1 million minimum wage workers –
Universal Living Wage Coalition, No Date.
(Universal Living Wage Coalition, [Non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas], NA. http://www.universallivingwage.org/)
The federal government says 42 percent of these people are working some of the time during the week. Clearly, the work ethic is there, but the wage to afford basic housing is not. These folks come from the pool of 20 million minimum wage workers. This includes undocumented workers in this country. Minimum wage jobs (those that can’t be outsourced) were once stepping stones. Now, when coupled with subsidies, they are the jobs raising whole families. Our proposal, through a ten-year plan, is to fix the Federal Minimum Wage by indexing it to the local cost of housing throughout the United States. The antithesis of being housed is homelessness. Let's get going!

And, Living Wage Differs throughout areas, so beneficial for everyone – lam ‘15

(Bouree Lam, reporter, The Living Wage Gap: State by State, Atlantic, )
As the fight for a higher minimum wage continues across the country, a big part of the argument for higher wages concerns the cost of living—and how the wage needed to cover the costs of living fluctuates with geography. It is not a coincidence that the biggest battlegrounds in the Fight for 15 movement have been big cities, where everything simply costs more.Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at MIT, developed the Living Wage Calculator to compare the cost of living with the minimum wage across the U.S. The idea came to her when she was studying impoverished communities. “We noticed that counties in poor regions had left poverty in the 1990s and then descended again into poverty,” Glasmeier told me. “We searched for the reason why and found that a lot of former poor counties that climbed out of poverty fell back in because they lost major employers. We knew that costs would not fall as fast and hence the tool was built to look at living costs.”Glasmeier says that firms can use it to estimate how to pay their employees fairly, while workers can use it to see how high the cost of living is when considering moving to take a new job, or just as information about their home area.

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