With the cost of housing rising much faster than the minimum wage, if a worker could devote 100 percent of her full-time minimum-wage earnings to housing, and miraculously avoid paying for food, utilities, transportation and other needs, she would still not be able to afford to rent an apartment. A worker in Hawaiʻi needs to earn more than $34 an hour to afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment.

We all know people—employees, friends, neighbors—who are juggling two or three jobs to cover the rent, and are paying the additional price in stress on themselves and their families. We can commend their hard work and hope for the best. But we can also improve the situation through changes in public policy.

We have examples of how other places have responded: New York and California plan to increase their minimum wage to $15. We can get there by 2023 with a $1 a year increase. Tying it to inflation thereafter will help close the widening gap between wages and the cost of housing. Policy makers can take comfort that this won’t drain the state’s coffers. Businesses benefit from workers putting those extra earned dollars back into the economy to purchase basic necessities.

Helping our neighbors begins with seeing them. It’s an oft-repeated myth that minimum wage jobs are mostly held by teenagers. In reality, only one-tenth of minimum wage workers are teens. Nearly 70 percent of the almost 200,000 workers in Hawaiʻi impacted by the minimum wage are over 25 years old; 25 percent are parents; nearly 60 percent are women.