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Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

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Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea of the scale of the numbers you’re talking about here? 1/3 of the defense budget is nothing, about $250 billion. A UBI that’s double the cost of a 2BR in NYC would be $7,500 per month, or $540 billion per year for every adult in NYC. And NYC is just 2.5% of the country’s population. You’d have to cut 1/3 of the defense budget about 80 times.

It's almost as if $7,500/month for a 2BR apartment is ridiculous, no matter where it is.

It costs what it costs because of supply and demand. If you paid for people’s housing no matter where they wanted to live, everyone would move to highly desirable areas and $7,500 would look like pocket change because the demand would greatly exceed the supply.

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#132
post #8

Is minimum wage workers affording an average 1-2 bedroom apartment with no other householders a goal we have set? The French minimum wage is 1,521 euro per month. 30% of that is 456 euros, or about $513. According to the underlying study, the average 1BR in Alabama is $665. Is housing in France, on average, really that much cheaper than Alabama? I don’t think these abstract targets are very helpful. According to the…

One thing always missed in these articles is that 2.7% of the work force makes minimum wage, and that population is not stable (people quickly move out of this baseline).

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#133
post #8

Is minimum wage workers affording an average 1-2 bedroom apartment with no other householders a goal we have set? The French minimum wage is 1,521 euro per month. 30% of that is 456 euros, or about $513. According to the underlying study, the average 1BR in Alabama is $665. Is housing in France, on average, really that much cheaper than Alabama? I don’t think these abstract targets are very helpful. According to the…

Look at it from the other direction. Is working 40 hours per week but not being able to afford a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment a goal we want to set? If so, we have achieved it! I think most of us like the idea that if you put in 40 hours of work every week, regardless of the specific job, you are able to afford a basic standard of living.

I don't think most of think this. It doesn't scale. That would mean you could have households of one people with another rent to afford 4 houses. Thats 1.2 billion units of housing just in case people want to live alone.

Even if you only do half thats a crazy stat. 600 million units and having to hit that right on the head in terms of the distribution of humans at all time.

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#134
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage is not designed to provide enough income to support a family. It it intended to prevent labor abuse.

It's interesting that our economy has so many positions compensating at a rate designed to prevent labor abuse.

Unintended consequences.

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real issue. Imo: there's not enough upwards mobility in jobs because people are retiring later in life. We need to make it cheaper to retire and for workforces to move up the ladder. I know this sounds elitist, but when I worked in a shop, I didn't expect to be able to afford a house.

This is an interesting point I have not contemplated in my musings on the issue so far. Something I should have thought of earlier since my dad came out of retirement and thus is taking up a position that otherwise could have been occupied by the promotion of someone who graduate more recently. Thanks for sharing it.

It’s a long article but if you just skip along and read around the graphs you get a lot of context on this situation. I also found it fascinating when I first stumbled upon it .

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boswort...

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#136
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is there if you are willing to reduce the wealth generated by investment properties for an already much wealthier investment class. How do you justify your priorities ethically? Do you think the world works according to ethical priorities or market forces? Imagine if engineers could use similar logic as political theorists. We could will our airplanes to fly by setting the right priorities!

Market forces are real, but can be regulated to align with our priorities. It's not a matter of explaining "how the world works." The market works how we design it to work. If it is unregulated, it frequently reflects exploitation. You make a quip about engineers and political theorists, but fail to explain why a market cannot be regulated in order to benefit society in general. We do it all the time.

Regulation doesn't change market forces. Regulation adds additional elements which in combination with the market forces moves the market to a different equilibrium. It's like pushing on a balloon--you can't change the physics, but you pushing on the balloon in different ways will produce different results dictated by those physics.

The difference between those two views of the world is the difference between political theorists and engineers. A political theorist asks questions like "how do you justify your priorities?" An engineer asks "how much do I have to give up on this one priority in order to achieve this other priority?" Engineers deal with a world where achieving every priority means giving up some other priority.

Applying this logic to your statement exposes the flow: "The solution is there if you are willing to reduce the wealth generated by investment properties for an already much wealthier investment class."

Sure, things like price control prioritize affordability at the expense of "wealth generated by investment properties." If that was it nobody would argue against price control. So why do so many people oppose price controls? (The answer is not, I'm sorry to say, that many people simply want owners of investment properties to be rich.) See: https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-eviden...

> Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. These results highlight that forcing landlords to provide insurance to tenants against rent increases can ultimately be counterproductive.

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#137
post #8

Is minimum wage workers affording an average 1-2 bedroom apartment with no other householders a goal we have set? The French minimum wage is 1,521 euro per month. 30% of that is 456 euros, or about $513. According to the underlying study, the average 1BR in Alabama is $665. Is housing in France, on average, really that much cheaper than Alabama? I don’t think these abstract targets are very helpful. According to the…

The promise of the free market economy is that the standard of living keeps improving over time, and that includes housing. For probably a majority of the population of the US, that has not been the case for a number of decades.

I mean that's just not true. With respect to housing, for example: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/houses1.jpg

The median new home is double the size of what it was in 1973. In today's new houses, each person has about as much space as the entire solidly middle class 3BR house my four-person family lived in growing up.

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#138
The title for this post is misleading and should be changed. Minimum wage works can afford rent, just not at the (quite high) standards set in this study:

- no more than 30% of income on rent

- 40th percentile for rental prices in the location (a mere 10% away from the lake wobegon standard of making everyone above average)

Re: Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you believe the problem lies?

The people who can’t perform labor worth more than a few dollars an hour.

Does the problem really lie in those people, themselves, or in the circumstances that led to their labor being worth so little?
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