41–50 of 108 posts
Everyone living in a rented apartment is under constant survival stress, with a subconscious fear of joblessness and eviction.
They compared minimum wage to median housing costs, and found that minimum wage is not enough to afford median housing. But isn't this exactly what we'd expect? You can't have everyone able to afford housing that is in the top 50% of housing costs (except possibly in Lake Wobegon). This seems like the housing equivalent of those periodic "richest N% have M% of the wealth" where M > N stories that present that as some…
> 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
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…
Money laundering. It’s as easy as that. International organised and serious crime is buying up real estate to clean their money flows, typically from wholesale meth/cocaine/opioids and human trafficking.
Then they started buying up businesses and politicians and now we are here.
Construction companies build huge towers full of huge apartments nobody can afford, yet they are all bought up, and nobody lives in them.
> 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…
Nope. This is minimum wage and sadly there are plenty of people with an income lower than that. You have to chart both progressively and simultaneously.
Bottom %1 income to bottom %1 rent, 1-2, 2-5, 5-10, 10-20 etc. I'm not familiar with the data so those bucket sizes and positions are almost certainly capable of being greatly improved.
The next question, and the one clearly being examined is raising the minimum wage. Seeing how it affects everyone all the way down is informative there.
This is the actual source of the article[1]. The methodology does not support the claim the title makes. >LendingTree used U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Census Bureau data to determine whether owning or renting a home is affordable to a person working a full-time minimum wage job. Assuming a person could afford to spend up to 30% of their gross monthly income on housing, LendingTree calculated how much in monthly…
As long as I can remember a reasonable budget has been assumed to be 1/3 on housing, 1/3 on living expenses and 1/3 on savings.
I never really saw that as unreasonable. Are there people who think it's reasonable for an average household budget to be 40% living expenses and 60% housing?
This is the actual source of the article[1]. The methodology does not support the claim the title makes. >LendingTree used U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Census Bureau data to determine whether owning or renting a home is affordable to a person working a full-time minimum wage job. Assuming a person could afford to spend up to 30% of their gross monthly income on housing, LendingTree calculated how much in monthly…
>This study assumes you must spend less than 30% of your income on housing As long as I can remember a reasonable budget has been assumed to be 1/3 on housing, 1/3 on living expenses and 1/3 on savings. I never really saw that as unreasonable. Are there people who think it's reasonable for an average household budget to be 40% living expenses and 60% housing?
This is the actual source of the article[1]. The methodology does not support the claim the title makes. >LendingTree used U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Census Bureau data to determine whether owning or renting a home is affordable to a person working a full-time minimum wage job. Assuming a person could afford to spend up to 30% of their gross monthly income on housing, LendingTree calculated how much in monthly…
>This study assumes you must spend less than 30% of your income on housing As long as I can remember a reasonable budget has been assumed to be 1/3 on housing, 1/3 on living expenses and 1/3 on savings. I never really saw that as unreasonable. Are there people who think it's reasonable for an average household budget to be 40% living expenses and 60% housing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> No local minimum wages are sufficient to afford a one-bedroom rental home at the Fair Market Rent with a 40 hour work week.
https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2021/Out-of-Reach_...