Some Working Definitions

These are a rewrite of definitions I originally posted on Reddit. They were designed for an international audience where dollar amounts do a poor job of expressing anything meaningful.

This should be equally useful to an American audience trying to compare rural life, small town living and life in the big city where dollar amounts also fail to be adequately meaningful information for comparison purposes.

Poverty is where "for want of a nail, the war was lost."

A middle class lifestyle is where you can reliably arrange "the stitch in time that saves nine."

Poverty housing is housing that fosters poverty and makes it hard to escape because you have challenges arranging adequate nutrition and challenges physically accessing basic essentials, like earned income and adequate health care.

Middle class housing is housing that is designed to not be burdensome to maintain and to give residents adequate access to a nourishing diet, earned income, education and other essentials of a full life.