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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

#141

Post by centimeter »

jirdperson wrote: post #140
centimeter wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is a purely moral judgement - you can argue, in the most extremal case, that every aspect of a person's behavior is purely "circumstantial". After all, your personality and capabilities are entirely shaped by circumstances like genetics and life experience.

Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.

From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.

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

#142

Post by monadic2 »

bonestormii_ wrote: post #56
monadic2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A federal program would basically mean bureaucrats from these states would be imposing housing policy on the whole country. Funny way to put "providing housing for its own citizens".

I'm for regulation of the housing industry, but he's not wrong that public housing policy is a shit show. What he is wrong about is that landlords actually prefer it this way, because they prefer subsidies to pricing regulation.

To which public housing policy are you referring?

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

#143

Post by jahaja »

rayiner wrote: post #105
bonestormii_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can that be, exactly? If it's "extensively regulated", then why is it so expensive? Can you point to a relationship between capping the price and inflating it? They seem to be inversely related.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... In Stockholm, decades of rent regulation has created a massive undersupply of housing. That means there is a 9-year wait list for apartments. The way rent regulation usually works is it caps rent increases for a given tenant. Tenants thus never leave their apartments, so the prices for the few openings (and newly built apartments) is astronomical. > Anot…

This i such a paperthin take on the Swedish housing market that I'm starting to assume that you're intentionally manipulative. I can even remember explaining this to you once.

The government made sure that there was enough supply of apartments. This was removed 30 years ago or so. The "Market" took over instead.

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

#144

Post by woodandsteel »

rayiner wrote: post #137
woodandsteel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh you have to be kidding. I grew up in the 50's, and things are so much more difficult for young people today. If they are in the upper quarter of society they have to compete so much harder, and if they are below that they are so much less likely to have a good job, like the secure, union factory jobs that were so common. And besides that education has gotten vastly more expensive, and so has housing in much of the country, and also health care. And then there was the great recession of 2007. There are so many young people today who are doing worse than there parents.

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

#145

Post by gremlinsinc »

pb7 wrote: post #131
bonestormii_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the government should instead invest in lowering demand by creating decent homes for Seems to me the problem is a supply issue, and we just need a bigger supply. That's an easy solve.

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

#146

Post by gremlinsinc »

rayiner wrote: post #111
gremlinsinc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just institute a UBI program specifically covering housing that is the average rent cost for a 2 bedroom apartment in the locale in which you live. So you always have rent covered, regardless of your paycheck. They could maybe double that, and have it cover food stamps too, to cut out some of the administrative costs to manage both programs. This works for married couples too, because you'd get double that, which…

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.

wear are you getting those numbers?

This site shows $1700 for a 2br in brooklyn.

https://www.apartments.com/brooklyn-ny/2-bedrooms/?so=2

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

#147

Post by gremlinsinc »

bonestormii_ wrote: post #108
gremlinsinc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just institute a UBI program specifically covering housing that is the average rent cost for a 2 bedroom apartment in the locale in which you live. So you always have rent covered, regardless of your paycheck. They could maybe double that, and have it cover food stamps too, to cut out some of the administrative costs to manage both programs. This works for married couples too, because you'd get double that, which…

I agree, but I also believe housing regulation and health care reform must accompany these things. Allowing these markets to buoy with the increase in everyone's income will negate the positive impact, having the effect of routing the additional income into the hands of the same people who already hold all of the wealth.

Not sure on housing regulations, but definitely need healthcare for everybody. Couldn't hurt to have the government also build some public housing to offset supply. It'd probably be cheaper. In the old west you could stake a claim on some land and just build a house, and live in it.

Those days are long gone and aren't coming back. So there needs to be some other contract that can guarantee a home for everybody.

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