31–40 of 58 posts
Am I the only one that doesn't see the value of assessing this at the state level? Given the drastic variability of rents within states, this seems like a useless (not to mention misleading) unit of analysis. Even worse, this kind of sensationalism around rising rents seems to be bringing the rent control zombie back to life in a number of cities. What a disaster that would be.
Shouldn't they be using the median income since it's more resistant to outliers? Or did they just disregard the outliers?
The article doesn't address why the hourly wage for 2-bedroom is relevant in relation to say, a 1-bedroom, studio, or mansion. Looking briefly at the BLS data, it seems that there are about equal numbers of single- and double-earner households. It's not clear to me that a single-earner household should expect to be able to rent a two bedroom apartment.
How dare single parent families expect to live somewhere decent.
The argument here is comparing the AVERAGE rental price with the MINIMUM wage, and then concluding that the minimum wage is less than the average rental? Well no shit! States that have rich people will have a higher average. But there are also plenty of cheap 2-bedroom apartments too! Why don't you compare the MINIMUM available 2-bedroom price with the MINIMUM wage? Then you can see if our poor can afford to live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In additional most of these lower wage job should be for younger high school age or college students. A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided on corner cases. Youth unemployment is significantly higher than the national average and if wages are mandated even higher then no one will take the chance on a 15 ye…
> A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided on corner cases. Maybe you think they shouldn't be, but statistics show they are . Good jobs are hard to come by and the median age of fast-food workers is 28[0] (meaning half are older than that). It's absolutely not a weird corner case. It's a very common thing, an…
This sort of stuff rubs me the wrong way. I live about 20 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. When I graduated college 6 years ago, I held down a restaurant job while doing an internship that would eventually lead to my first full-time job in my field. I had a roommate who worked at a hotel. We found a two-bedroom apartment (a house split into 3 units) that was going for $425/month plus utilities. Because we split, I had…
In additional most of these lower wage job should be for younger high school age or college students. A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided on corner cases. Youth unemployment is significantly higher than the national average and if wages are mandated even higher then no one will take the chance on a 15 ye…
Like Pavel says above/below, state level data like this is ok, but county level or even finer-grained data would be a lot better. There's a big difference in cost of living between Portland, Oregon and Burns, Oregon.
I'm missing some definitions here. Not sure if I didn't see something, but what are they assuming in terms of number of hours/week and what does "two-bedroom housing wage" mean: is this just the wage at x hours/week that allows you to rent the average 2BR or does it include some other kind of spending like food? Because what does it help if minimum wage pays for the apartment but I can't eat? On a different note, in…