Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're identifying the right problem (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. The easy way to realize this is to notice that the median wage has increased by proportionally less than the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle can't afford school or housing either. And what…
> (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) On the housing side, the root problem is obvious: Real estate cannot be both affordable and considered an investment. If it's affordable, that means the price is staying flat relative to inflation, which makes it a poor investment. If it's a good investment, that means the value is rising faster than inflation, which means unaffordability is inevitable. The solu…
This is a misunderstanding of what makes something a good investment. Something is a good investment if it's better for you than your other alternatives.
Suppose you buy a house and then have a mortgage payment equivalent to the amount you'd have been paying in rent until the mortgage is paid off. At that point you have an asset worth e.g. $200,000 and you no longer have a mortgage payment. By contrast, if you'd been paying rent instead then you'd have to continue paying rent. That makes the house a good investment even if its value hasn't increased by a single cent since you bought it -- it could even have been a good investment if its value has gone down, because its true value is in not having to pay rent. Paying $300,000 over time for a house which is now worth $200,000 leaves you $200,000 ahead of the person who paid $300,000 in rent in order to end up with the asset you can find on the inside of an empty box.
Likewise, suppose you're in the landlord business. In one city it costs a million dollars to buy a two bedroom unit and then you can rent it out for $10,000/month. In another city the same two bedroom unit costs $10,000 to buy but then you could only rent it out for $100/month. If your business is to buy the property and rent it out, is one of these a better investment than the other? No, the ROI is exactly the same for both of them and either one could plausibly be a good investment even without any appreciation.
In both cases the value of the property doesn't have to increase to make it a good investment and in both cases the value of the property may not even come into play, because if you're planning to keep the asset in order to live in it or rent it out then you can't simultaneously sell it. And for homeowners, even if you were planning to sell it eventually, you'd then still need somewhere to live, so having all housing cost more isn't doing the average homeowner any good. If they sold they'd only have to pay the higher price to live somewhere else.
However, there is one major difference between homeowners and landlords. If you increase the supply of housing, rents go down. For homeowners that doesn't matter, because they're "renting" to themselves; they pay (opportunity cost) and receive (imputed rent) in equal amounts, so it doesn't matter to them if local rents change -- or it benefits them because it lowers local cost of living and then they pay lower prices for local things. Whereas landlords will fight you on that to their last breath, because that's their actual return on investment. Which is why they're the villains and they need to lose.