Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

money.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#31

Post by mandmandam »

dijit wrote: post #3

I’m not entirely sure how we got to this place but it definitely feels this way in the UK too at times, though the circumstances might be different. Housing as an absolute expense has risen faster than income in nearly every developed country that I can think of. But, something that I always bring up when minimum wage is mentioned as a panacea: Sweden does not have a federally mandated minimum wage, but people are pa…

> I’m not entirely sure how we got to this place

Me neither, but I'm 100% sure it has a lot to do with golden circles teaming up to fuck the majority. At least it 100% for sure is in Ireland.

We have captured newspapers and TV completely reliant on government spending to stay afloat running glossy, thick, full-colour property pull-outs and programs.

At the same time our own government argues that building social housing would negatively affect the ability of property vultures to capitalise on their tax-free earnings.

We have a concrete cartel, protected by our government and courts for decades.

We have openly captured regulators, who stifle complaints and drag proceedings out for years or decades only to do nothing.

We have lawyers who are perfectly content to make bank off the above, and the tribunals that come when someone's actually caught taking bribes.

* We have > 230,000 unoccupied homes, at the same time as record-high homelessness and child deprivation. *

We have politically connected assholes making huge sums of money offering hotel rooms as emergency accommodation to homeless families.

I could go on and on. And, a huge amount of this is widely known among the population.

But what the government has here is an easy scapegoat. Every time they get caught bribing newspapers for fake news, or throwing crowded golf parties during a pandemic with vulture fund owners and judges 100 to a room, they just point the finger at Sinn Fein - a political party that has never once been in power - and talk about things that happened 40 years ago to rile up their aged base.

Oh, and our unions are weak and spineless. Not nearly as bad as American unions, but pretty bad all the same.

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#32

Post by strictfp »

skohan wrote: post #20
strictfp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Sweden and I can tell you that it's not so clear-cut. Rent control means that people have to queue for many years for decent rental apartments. We also have a lot of black market labour. The unions have historically had a strong grip, but are under attack by political forces that want to undermine that market with unskilled workers. And on top of all this I think that people simply always prioritize living…

Imo some level degree of rent control is needed to prevent forces like housing speculation from causing housing prices to spike wildly in certain market conditions. Otherwise you end up with SF where it's impossible for anyone but the highest income earners to even exist. I think the vienna model seems to have been fairly successful: if you build lots of high-quality public housing, the incentive structure is good fo…

Speculation is a problem for sure. I think USA is experiencing the burn for not being the number one financial power anymore. If the global market is hurting you, you'll need to protect yourselves by regulation. It's easy to be pro-globalization when you're king of the hill, but not always so great when you're getting the short end of the stick.

Oh, and I didn't know about the Vienna model, but Stockholm tried to massively expand housing in the 60s in something called the Million Program, as so many others did. Although that solved the immediate problem, it has been a catastrophy for the cityscape.

Isn't lack of housing sort of a side-effect of the very concept of a city?

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#33

Post by reilly3000 »

bombcar wrote: post #28

> They calculated how much in monthly housing costs a person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at the minimum wage hourly rate in their state could afford. They then compared that to the median monthly homeowner and rent costs derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. This … signifies nothing? Take a hypothetical state that consists of three people and three houses, one rented by…

https://reports.nlihc.org/oor

Yep, it’s still not affordable in 93% of US counties for full time minimum wage workers to afford a modest 1BD apartment.

Full time work even at minimum wage can be hard to get in many places, where employers like Walmart deliberately schedule workers less than full time to avoid paying benefits.

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#34

Post by trhway »

Aeolun wrote: post #26

> The researchers defined a maximum of 30% of gross monthly income on housing as affordable. By that measure rents are unaffordable even to SV workers.

>By that measure rents are unaffordable even to SV workers.

The rents in MV are $4K ballpark for 2/2 which is a minuscule part of all those $300-600K+ compensations around. Today for tech workers the situation is much more affordable, be it rent or buy, than it was 20 years ago when i first came here. 13 years ago i bought townhouse at the peak for almost 6x my salary back then at 5.25%, and it was a bit of uncomfortable stretch. Today a tech worker for 6x yearly comp at 3% can very comfortably afford a pretty nice house here. In the recent years a bunch of tech neighbors and acquaintances have already bought their second [town]house. Of course the tech workers with these money sloshing around have been the major factor making it much less affordable for everybody else.

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#35

Post by nly »

dijit wrote: post #3

I’m not entirely sure how we got to this place but it definitely feels this way in the UK too at times, though the circumstances might be different. Housing as an absolute expense has risen faster than income in nearly every developed country that I can think of. But, something that I always bring up when minimum wage is mentioned as a panacea: Sweden does not have a federally mandated minimum wage, but people are pa…

Wrt the UK. There was an article recently about "affordable" out-of-London commuter homes being built in Harrow.

£300K for <40m^2, one bed, which is barely affordable to a couple both on median salaries.

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#36

Post by joeberon »

Aeolun wrote: post #26

> The researchers defined a maximum of 30% of gross monthly income on housing as affordable. By that measure rents are unaffordable even to SV workers.

Yeah that's really low. I just moved to Hamburg as a postdoctoral researcher and our international housing office said to expect to spend around 60% of our salary on rent. Then again rent here includes heating which changes it a little

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#37

Post by bombcar »

reilly3000 wrote: post #33
bombcar wrote: post #28

> They calculated how much in monthly housing costs a person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at the minimum wage hourly rate in their state could afford. They then compared that to the median monthly homeowner and rent costs derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. This … signifies nothing? Take a hypothetical state that consists of three people and three houses, one rented by…

https://reports.nlihc.org/oor Yep, it’s still not affordable in 93% of US counties for full time minimum wage workers to afford a modest 1BD apartment. Full time work even at minimum wage can be hard to get in many places, where employers like Walmart deliberately schedule workers less than full time to avoid paying benefits.

That shows modest two bedroom but is still a much better dataset than the one originally posted.

Interestingly enough around here they’re advertising double to almost triple the legal minimum for entry-level service jobs such as McDonalds or gas station clerk and apparently are not having many takers.

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#38

Post by mandmandam »

leppr wrote: post #18
mandmandam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage is absolutely a problem. Maybe not "the" problem, but it's a massive and highly solvable problem which only the profoundly ignorant could possible believe has no effect on low earners ability to rent a roof over their head. > People move up from those starter jobs, they don't stay there forever. Please explain to me how that's different from a serf paying off their ownership debt, or a slave winning his…

Why would there not be a market for housing people with low wages? There are markets for cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap entertainment, ... Everything except lodging. There's a hiccup somewhere in the "free market" of many countries that prevents it from providing cheap housing, even though there's clearly a huge business opportunity.

There are multiple hiccups, which don't seem quite independent of each other as they all make similar groups of people massive amounts of cash.

Some words that come to mind are "cartel", "regulatory capture", "lobbying", "government contracts", and "artifical scarcity".

Re: Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

#39

Post by nickthemagicman »

bombcar wrote: post #28

> They calculated how much in monthly housing costs a person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at the minimum wage hourly rate in their state could afford. They then compared that to the median monthly homeowner and rent costs derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. This … signifies nothing? Take a hypothetical state that consists of three people and three houses, one rented by…

I think they're using the median instead of the mean for exactly this reason. It's a more robust measure central tendency.

Looking at those rental prices it looked very accurate to me.

The real problem is why would they compare minimum wage with median rental prices?

Both are distributions.

Post reply on HN