How much does it really cost to live in Seattle? A quick look at whether someone can make it on $15 an hour in the Emerald City

In 2014, Seattle's City Council approved a $15 per hour minimum wage — the highest in the nation.

Washington already had the highest minimum wage in the country at the time (it has since been eclipsed by Washington D.C., California, Massachusetts and Alaska).

But Seattle's bustling economy required that employers here pay the lowest-paid workers more to give them a shot at living in the region, proponents of the wage hike argued.

The higher wage didn't take effect all at once — instead it's being phased in over three years, with it presently at $13 per hour for large employers.

And that's all well and good, but when you look at the cost of housing and transportation and even just enjoying some of the amenities that make Seattle so great, $15 per hour starts to seem kind of ... paltry.

So I decided to take a closer look at some of the numbers, just to see if someone could really make it in the Jet City on $31,200 per year (before taxes).

It's no secret that the Seattle area carries a high cost of living. A vibrant city bordered by water and islands, dotted and surrounded with forests and a stone's throw from some of the most glorious mountains in the U.S. is a desirable place to be, and the good people are willing to pay to get here.

Thanks to that and a bustling economy rife with lucrative tech jobs, the cost of housing is nothing to sneeze at. As of January, a one-bedroom apartment in the city averaged $1,660 per month, according to zumper.com.

Zillow lists the median rent (for all rentals) at $1,939 per month, but we'll work with the lower one-bedroom price, for the sake of being conservative.

Note that in the ledger.

If you should choose to buy here, the median home value is up to $533,000 — 13 percent higher than a year ago — and Zillow predicts those numbers will rise another 5.5 percent in a year.

For the sake of our ledger, we won't figure our worker is buying, because at $15 per hour, they wouldn't even be able to afford the $3,000-per-month mortgage on a $533,000 home, let alone the other costs of living here.

Moving on.

Other costs of living in Seattle are high, too. The Consumer Price Index puts Seattle at 250.942 for February. The CPI is a way of measuring the cost of goods by region or nationally, with the 1984 being 100, meaning goods in Seattle cost 150 percent more than they did in 1984.

That's down a tick since last summer, but it's up about 24 percent since 2006.

But that doesn't tell us what it costs to live here. You know, the cost of food, electricity, gas, water, phone, Internet, gas, and so on.

Luckily, a site called Numbeo lists costs for a whole bunch of things so we can calculate the cost of all that stuff.

Using Numbeo's cost of living estimator, we come up with a cost of $965 per month for a single person, before rent.

That includes $46.57 per month for going out for movies or drinks, and a mere $160.42 per month for restaurants, which includes coffee bought outside the house.

All this is based on some pretty conservative assumptions, including that you don't drive (you have a monthly transit pass) and that you never take a vacation.

This also assumes that you have zero debt, like that from student loans or credit cards, and despite our best intentions, 80 percent of Americans have some kind of debt, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Noted in the ledger. Now for some math.

If we add that estimated cost of living ($965) and the median price for a one-bedroom apartment ($1,660), we come up with a lean $2,625 per month.

That figures out to $31,500 per year — $300 more than our $15-per-hour wage worker's annual income before taxes.

Assuming our minimum-wage-earning Seattleite is a law-abiding tax payer, they'll lose about 13 percent of their income to taxes, leaving just $27,174 in their pockets.

But wait, you ask, does a single person really need a one-bedroom apartment? Can't they just have a studio? Or rent a room?

OK, if we go with Zillow's $1,360 median studio rent price from last November, we get an annual cost of living (remember, with no vacations and almost no going out) at $27,900 — $726 more than our worker earned in a year.

And this is getting pretty conservative.

If you use the Economic Policy Institute's budget calculator for the Seattle-Bellevue metro area, it will spit out $32,122 for a single person.

So, can you afford to live in Seattle on $15 an hour?

Nope.

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.