Why not? After the last year and a half plus of them being hailed as "essential" and "heroic" for their "sacrifice" in keeping society functioning during the pandemic
Personally the entire concept of "I own one of the basic pillars of your survival, pay me for shelter" never really sat well with me.
But if we're just making a value judgement on "deserved" I'd think the people who keep society together for the rest of us should get a pretty big seat at the table
Minimum wage workers like those stocking grocery stores and cashiers at said grocery stores are pretty close to holding the world together (I realize many are not minimum wage workers, but many are, or are close enough, that I believe it holds). If everyone who will organize and process transactions for groceries stores dissapeared, life as we know it would change immediately and for the worse.
I suspect the minimum wage is quite well below the natural wage floor in most, if not all of the country at this point. Those cashier jobs pay over twice the federal minimum wage in my area, and I don't live in a particularly wealthy place. The only adults I've ever known that worked for minimum wage did so with other opportunities available to them, but took the part time minimum wage position in order to stay on Medicaid and collect other means tested benefits. If you were to raise the minimum wage to say $12 I'd expect the effect to be largely symbolic.
I live in a fairly well-off place and most food service jobs pay about $7.25-9/hour, _maybe_ with tips. My university (3 hours away) pays $8.50/hr for most student positions, a cruel joke when tuition is $10k+/year. Mine is about $13.5k but I have enough scholarships to bring it down to about 3k.
Napkin math shows that, to afford a $13.5k tuition bill, one must work 1564 hours for the university. They cap you at 20hrs/wk so as not to overburden you, so you can pay off your tuition bill in a mere 78 weeks. I go to one of the least expensive state universities.
A minimum wage raise would not be merely symbolic, at least not in Texas. If my university paid $12/hr, it would take 55 weeks to pay off tuition and at $15 it would take 44 weeks.
Tipped workers take some liberties with the income math. I spent a decade in the restaurant industry and front of house made considerably more than the back of the house while also paying less tax even though they were "only paid $2.75 an hour". Generally speaking cash tips are not reported and tax free, a server will make in excess of $20 an hour in a moderately successful resturant. The back of the house jobs now start around $13 an hour for unskilled labor in a hot and dangerous kitchen, every cent of it subject to tax. In addition by under reporting income, tipped workers often gain access to social programs that their true income would disqualify them from.
I don't know what the deal is with your university in particular, but your local Amazon warehouse is paying $15 an hour as that is their national minimum. Walmart just recently announced they are moving to $15 nationally as well I believe.
I was more referring to places like McDonald’s. I have a friend who technically makes tips at Jersey Mike’s but people don’t _really_ tip at places like that, especially since it’s just a tip jar, so cash only.
Tipped server jobs are actually in somewhat high demand around here since people generally tip well, especially with restaurants moving to those Toast PoS systems that prompt customers to tip.
A McDonald's owned by McDonald's itself (most are franchises and this is not the case) won't start you below $13, they aren't doing that because they are kind but because they found the wage floor for them to be about there. For context, I started dishwashing at the age of 13 at $8.25 an hour twenty years ago. In your position I wouldn't settle for one of those near minimum wage jobs take a look at things like garden centers, construction labor, bakeries, or even something like doordash that I hesitate to recommend but may be a better deal in this case.
I do wonder why that town has wages so far below what I'm seeing around. Perhaps this has something to do with it being a university town and having lots of unskilled labor? I also do wonder if it being a self fulfilling prophecy is also a possibility, if you get a bunch of people together who belive that wages are lower then they are, a savvy busineessman might make that belief a reality. Either way it's a interesting case study, thanks for sharing your experience and I will consider it further as I continue to look into this topic.
I'm also confused as to why wages are lower here. I'm with my family at the moment so this is a university town only in that there are some satellite campuses here. Most people here are well-off, and I think my anecdata might be partly tainted because I know my friends who have jobs here pretty much took the first jobs that they found.
I personally have a remote sde job, so all of this is anecdata I've collected from those around me, alongside seeing job postings out and about.
Child tax credits are fine, but if you don't make enough income to owe taxes in the first place they don't do squat for you. It's a credit, not a payment. The lowest wage-earning parents get benefit from them.
Social housing is a different story. Where I live, it's notoriously hard to get into (waitlists of 8 years or more), has strict income requirements (get a raise? lose your home!) and is often poorly maintained because anti-poor city politicians wont make the investments necessary to improve and expand it.
Most other programs that we're told exist to help the poor are similar. They're limited, means-tested, complex to apply for, and often still short of what's needed.
Where I live, a friend got into section 8 in very short order (pretty sure less than a year, I think a few months at most) and it was in a fairly upscale apartment building for the area. Also relied on other programs as he had a wife and newborn at the time.
Surprisingly few in the US, given how much attention it gets. Something like 3-4% of employees earn federal minimum wage, a significant chunk of which are minors.
> Minimum wage is a ridiculous concept. Why make it illegal to accept wages below certain levels? The only thing it does is increase unemployment.
I'm not very strong on economics so mine is likely a foolish perspective, but I always thought minimum wage existed to prevent a race to the bottom where the bottom is asymptotic? Since there are companies getting away with paying minimum wage now, doesn't this indicate that they're fine paying as little as possible but also aren't lacking in employees? Corporations already have such one-sided power over job seekers (I know that I as a dev am guilty of forgetting this from time to time), I find it very difficult to believe that without a mandated minimum, there would be no shortage of companies eager to get away with paying even less. They're doing it now and being successful, why wouldn't they do it then and be successful?
And we can say all day and all night how "the market will correct this, no one will work for them!" but clearly since there are people working for the absolute minimum right now, there would be people working for the absolute minimum then too; the only difference is that the current minimum is set by the government and this theoretical minimum would be set by each individual corporation. I may not have a lot of faith in the government, but I sure know which of those two I'd rather rely on in this case.
But again, I have no formal econ education, so I'll confess I don't know anything about anything. Genuine question: how does minimum wage increase unemployment? Sure, if Alice was earning minimum wage, her boss could hire Bob at half minimum wage if Alice took a 50% pay cut, but how does that actually help Alice or Bob? Yeah, unemployment drops, but welfare claims and poverty levels skyrocket as Alice joins Bob in the welfare system. I just don't see it, but I'm clearly missing something.
A much larger percentage earn very little. Looking at the data the way you are, someone making $8.00 an hour would not be included. There are many such situations, particularly in the food-service industry, where just-barely-above-minimum wage jobs are common.
That’s nice and all until it becomes illegal to get abortions 6 weeks after conception. Or when schools teach abstinence-only sex ed.
I could somewhat agree with this argument if we had better sex ed, better access to contraceptives, and better access to abortions. All three are clearly getting worse in Texas.
I've been pondering the word "deserve". I translate it as "something the speaker expects and wants" but it pretends to be a reason. I wonder if it reveals which opinions the speaker has which they haven't yet bothered to find reasons for.
I've removed it from my vocabulary hoping to do a better job asking myself "why do I expect that?" and "why would that be good?"
The study found that the minimum wage isn't enough to afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental.
Trying to compare average rents to minimum wages doesn't make sense, as anyone earning minimum wage wouldn't be in the market for an average-price two-bedroom rental. It would have been more useful if they had studied something like bottom decile wages compared to bottom decile rents.
The title says that minimum wage cannot afford any apartments, while it should actually say that minimum wage cannot afford average two bedroom apartments.
The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments.
So if there are 35000 adults in a city making minimum wage and 200 total 2br apartments they can afford, does that somehow lead us to a different conclusion? Of course it doesn't.
Maybe those 35,000 adults should move somewhere where pay is better and/or rent is cheaper. This isn't a hard concept. If there are 35,000 hunter-gatherers in a forest that can only support 400, are we supposed to sympathize with the stubborn ones that don't want to move out?
There are another 3000 hunter-gatherers who have hoarded 90% of the resources. If we split up the resources more equally we could support everyone easily.
The 3000 billionaires are hoarding 90% of housing supply in major cities? I doubt that. The lack of housing in such places has less to do with wealth concentration to billionaires and more with local grassroots opposition for new housing developments.
Is moving free/cheap for you? I’m fairly well off and the actual financial moving costs were enough to keep me from seeking a better deal on only every 3+ years when I would have been willing to spend the time (1 weekend) to move every year
Well we could subsidize people to move to a place that's affordable, but I suspect that has similar optics to "giving homeless people bus tickets to another town"
I don’t think that type of plan is bad because of “optics” but also because it doesn’t solve the problem. Subsidizing people’s moves doesn’t make sure they have access to housing. It just shuffles them to another area where it’s someone else’s long term problem, even if you secured them temporary housing as you moved them.
We have more empty houses than homeless in the US. We should be able to guarantee food, water, and shelter to every citizen, even if we don’t necessarily guarantee it’s in a place someone desires.
We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
> We have more empty houses than homeless in the US. We should be able to guarantee food, water, and shelter to every citizen, even if we don’t necessarily guarantee it’s in a place someone desires.
How many people experiencing houselessness are you willing to ship off to rural Nebraska where they know nobody, have no support system, no supportive services, and probably are grossly unfamiliar with the local culture?
Is your answer "all of them"? Perhaps with some qualifier about how they'll receive food, water, and free transportation to this location?
You're absolutely right. Our society is unquestionably wealthy enough to provide for the basic needs of all. You are experiencing a beautiful blossoming of genuine human compassion. It's just perhaps possible that this might be a chance to think more precisely about how to translate that into policy.
>Subsidizing people’s moves doesn’t make sure they have access to housing. It just shuffles them to another area where it’s someone else’s long term problem, even if you secured them temporary housing as you moved them.
We're not shuffling people around for the sake of getting them out of the area. we're shuffling people around so they can move to an area that has a better job market relative to local rents. This is supposed to address the "they can't move to find a better job because they can't afford the cost of moving" objection a few comments up.
>We have more empty houses than homeless in the US.
A sibling comment has addressed this so I won't go into this further.
>We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
Because it's a political problem (ie. NIMBY), not a economic one.
Some of the weird reaction to this type of comment is that being more scientifically accurate about the problem is perceived as being less persuasive about the importance of correcting the problem.
Making the numbers more right doesn’t make the reality any less cruel, and more accurate numbers don’t seem to help persuade anyone to care. So it’s legitimate to say “could be better!”, but that’s often viewed as important relative to the issue itself: people can’t afford a home in America.
I just want to note that while housing prices are probably normally distributed, "minimum wage" is a "arbitrary" value that cuts of the long tail (effectively increasing average wages).
As, per that definition, wages are now not normally distributed anymore it (statistically) does not even make sense to talk about average (i.e. mean) wages anymore.
More anecdotally: I recently looked up mean and median wages in Germany. And what I found is that the median netto income (per employer) does not really differ from the netto income per household. I guess that means that the average German household only has one person working (while the other is probably taking care of potential kids).
>Making the numbers more right doesn’t make the reality any less cruel, and more accurate numbers don’t seem to help persuade anyone to care.
...and that's how you end up with polarization with media. Neutral/objective reporting gets dropped because it "seem to help persuade anyone to care". It's replaced with misleading reporting optimized for shock value which gets a pass from one side because it fits in with their narrative, but is rejected by the other because of how biased it is.
Studies show that the narrative will be rejected just as strongly if it’s presented neutrally with facts alone. I don’t disagree with your point in general, but non-polarized news isn’t much more able to get through to opposed people than polarized news. It turns out to be more complicated, generally requiring personalized one-on-one conversations, and can’t really be scaled up to broadcast media.
Why is the average rent meaningful? I mean, if you just want to generate big numbers, why not compare the minimum wage to luxury condos in the most expensive cities?
People in luxury condos don't care about rent prices, and renters can't empathize with people in luxury condos. Such a comparison alone does not provide any benefit to the conversation, until it's taken in the direction of Executive Compensation Multipliers and turned into an evaluation metric that everyone can comprehend and grasp, beyond just a standalone statistic.
I disagree and don't believe that minimum wage should sustain a single adult with kids. It should sustain a kid or maybe an adult individual with support from a 3rd party. Compare the amount of adults that held minimum wage jobs in say, 1979-1982 to now.
You fell for the trap in the parent post's phrasing. Everyone not being able to afford the average rent (ie. there is at least one person that can't afford the average rent) doesn't mean people will be homeless. The people making minimum wage can live in below average housing
Maybe you're falling for a trap here too? The phrasing implies the availability of a sufficient supply of adequate housing that's meaningfully below average rent, but that doesn't seem obvious to me.
It is a moral failure of our society - where there IS so much wealth - that so many struggle so hard just to put a roof of their heads. It's a worse failure still that anyone goes homeless.
you can afford food and obamacare on minimum wage, though
The reason you can't afford rent is because our housing policies make home ownership a highly-leveraged, government-backed investment that's guaranteed to appreciate exponentially forever
> our housing policies make home ownership a highly-leveraged, government-backed investment that's guaranteed to appreciate exponentially forever
It's not appreciating, it's pacing real inflation, if you're lucky.
You can tell by comparing it to other significant $USD priced items over decades: gold, oil, healthcare, education, cost of a new car.
Housing isn't even outrunning the price inflation on new cars (a purely capital eating monster). In 2000 the average price of a new car was $21,000; today it's $41,000 (no joke). In 2000 the average home sale price (not new homes, any homes), was ~$205,000; today it's a bit over $400,000.
Most people get their asses handed to them in real terms on their home 'investments.' Inflation alone is enough to ensure they don't earn a real return. And then once you add in maintenance, repairs, interest, insurance and property taxes, forget about it. Housing as a good investment is one of the greatest financial frauds ever sold to the masses. It only works on average in fantasy if someone drops context of the total cost across 30 or 50 years. For the average person it becomes a very mediocre form of savings.
China's cheap manufacturing spared the US a significant cost of living beating over the past 20 years, by supplying a vast deflationary push down on US consumer prices. That shielded households from some of the currency destruction (inflationary) hit that is more widely reflected in the prior mentioned USD priced items.
That's why we have programs such as (but not limited to) section 8.
Most homelessness is temporary, and there is a lot of assistance in a variety of programs to help people in that situation. Most chronic homelessness is tied to mental health issues and / or drug abuse among people who refuse treatment, and would exist independent of minimum wage and rent levels.
Source: an ex and relatives who work with the homeless community.
> Handwavy nonsense. There are lots of places in the world where three or more people live in the space of a studio apartment.
In the US, some CPS will require kids to have their own bedrooms. Certain states also have housing laws requiring kids of certain ages to have their own bedrooms, as well. Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
> some CPS will require kids to have their own bedrooms.
AFAIK, rules of that type in state law, regulation, or child services practice generally apply strictly to substitute placements like foster and prospective or probationary adoptive homes, not regular custodial family settings, and even then usually allow room sharing for all of infants with parents, with children under a threshold age (commonly 5 or a little older), and children of the same gender regardless of age, though there may be numerical limits to each.
If you can cite a specific rule or supportive case that not having their own room alone can be a basis for CPS action anywhere in the US against a parent with permanent custody, please share.
> Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
No, they aren't. In fact, subsidy programs often set a maximum number of bedrooms of a subsidized unit as number of people/2, rounded up to a whole number [0], absolutely preventing each child from having a bedroom unless there is exactly one child. Which is one reason the earlier claim about CPS is not true.
[0] for an example, see https://www.scchousingauthority.org/section-8-current-partic... — note that the 2 occupants per bedroom standard is a national HUD standard (stemming from the 1991 Keating memo, subsequently mandated for adoption as HUD policy by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998.)
> I'm talking about situations in which kids share a bedroom with their parents.
In a single-parent family, one child wouldn't even qualify for a second bedroom under HUD guidelines. Now, its true that many child welfare rules wouldn't allow a placement to a foster or adoptive home that would force parent/child bedroom sharing, but neither would they prohibit it for an existing permanent family.
> The kids need another bedroom.
Again, if you have evidence such a rule exists, please present it.
>Handwavy nonsense. If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom.
This is changing the goalposts. It's no longer "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America" but rather "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America if they're single parents". Just for kicks you can extend this arbitrarily. Why stop at kids? What about your mom and dad too, for a multigenerational household?
I don't think the minimum wage is the best solution for the problem, however it must be noted that the families that are the worst off tend to live in places where it is more common to not have a male adult in the household then the reverse. Two incomes to support a family only works if dad sticks around and actively participates in maintaining the household
(of course single dad's exist too, but that is dramatically less common).
Because there are plenty of circumstances where living together is not possible.
What’s wrong with there being a system in place that ensures that everybody, irrespective of having gone through divorce, or death, medical issues etc, has a chance to survive with a roof about their head and some food on the table?
> If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom.
No disrespect is intended to anyone, but by definition a person making minimum wage is poor and why can’t they live in a single bedroom apartment or even a studio. Where does it say that minimum wage = every occupant gets their own bedroom?
In large parts of the world families share bedrooms.
Please note I’m not saying these people should not try to better their lives, but people making minimum wage need to compromise.
Not sure what you mean but I realized that no matter how I phrase my comment, it has the potential to be misinterpreted.
I simply was trying to say that minimum wage has a definition, and I’m assuming that definition is safe housing and sufficient food and other necessities. I’m assuming that it does not mean a certain size of housing, designer clothes, eating out a certain times a week and so on, since after all by definition it is minimum.
1) No, they don't "need" to be able to rent a 2-bedroom. 2-bedroom is a luxury in most of the world, either because well, it is, or because housing is equity-focused and therefore shitty (case in point is me growing up in the USSR with 2 engineer parents and a sister, in a 700sqft 1-bedroom equivalent).
Someone contributing the equivalent of minimum wage is not generally expected to be able to afford luxuries.
2) Having children while on minimum wage is child abuse. Similarly, nobody owes them the right to have children, and nobody should be obliged to pay for such profligate hobbies. Perhaps they should devote the time and resources otherwise spent on child-rearing to create more value for others first.
Further, less than 250,000 people out of 161 million in the US laborforce are actually earning the minimum wage. It's less than one sixth of one percent.
If you listened to the propaganda, you'd think it were 20% of the laborforce.
Which warrants a few other questions, including how many of those minimum wage workers are living with their parents rent free, what the average age of those workers is, and so on.
This study instantly becomes that much more absurd if you actually analyze the minimum wage worker segment. It ends up you're talking about 1/20th of 1% of the laborforce that it reasonably applies to.
247,000 people reported making federal minimum wage in 2020 according to BLS data.[1] It's a little less than 1/6% of 161 million.
This excludes 865,000 who reported making less. And a probably much larger number making local minimum wages. And any self employed or salaried workers who make minimum wage or less effectively. And anyone making the slightest amount more.
Even those numbers are highly misleading since half the states in the US (containing a strong majority of the population) have minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum wage.
But if they're making below minimum wage, why should we expect a change in minimum wage policy to help these people? Clearly their employers aren't interested in following minimum wage laws.
It's easy click-bait, but maybe a news organization and do some reporting on the actual living conditions for minimum wage workers since they're clearly living somewhere.
1.5% earn the federal minimum wage or less, down 0.4% from 2019. This excludes the workers in the 29 states (plus DC) with a higher state minimum wage. About 28% of the US workforce earns under $15 an hour.
From the article: A full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom rental in only 7% of all US counties — 218 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide.
The article really means a minimum wage worker cannot afford a 2-bedroom place. The larger problem is that in 93 percent of the US, they cannot even afford a 1-bedroom place.
It can be hard to find something smaller than a 2-bedroom place. We have torn down a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to create new Missing Middle Housing.
The real problem here is a general lack of housing stock of a certain kind: Smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that remain affordable and haven't become crazy expensive due to being part of an older vibrant area in very high demand.
I think one thing that would help in this discussion is a realization of how few people actually earn minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is below the wage floor in every major city in the US. Here in San Antonio, Texas, largely considered to be a poorer / lower wage city, typical non-skilled labor is paid between $12-$14/hr starting.
While Texas and San Antonio don't have higher legal minimum wages than the federal minimum, effectively nobody is earning the federal minimum because nobody will work for the federal minimum. Even gas station clerks and grocery store shelf stockers in San Antonio make at least $12/hr. The "nice" gas stations pay $14/hr /starting/ and up to $18/hr. This is in one of the lowest cost of living and lowest median earning major cities in the US.
It's simply not helpful to compare the bottom legal possible wage to average costs for a two-bedroom rental, when the typical bottom wage is much higher and most individuals earning these wages don't rent a two-bedroom apartment by themselves, they have room-mates or are part of a family unit where the cost of rent is shared.
Wow there’s a lot of out of touch people here. Just because someone makes a dollar over minimum doesn’t mean they suddenly can afford housing. Minimum wage is ridiculously low and should at minimum be enough for someone to work full time rent a reasonable distance from their place of employment and shop where they live.
It’s almost like the middle class feels threatened like they’re being devalued or something.
Everyone's first inclination is to raise the minimum wage (which I am not against). But let's not dismiss the fact that we could also work on lowering the cost of rents.
I used to think that rents are simply a function of supply and demand, but recently I realized that there's also a floor for rental prices regardless of the demand. That floor is a function of the cost of buying a house, property tax, and the opportunity cost (eg: stock market will give me an ROI of X, so real estate has to be within that range or I'll just move my assets accordingly).
I am only familiar with the SF market so the rest of the country might be totally different, but having looked into buying a house there I can totally understand why the floor for rental prices is as high as it is. The property tax is 1.2%, and good luck with buying something under a million dollars where you can expect to attract people with steady income. Last but not least, if we're really going to compare this investment with the stock market, then I shouldn't be expected to worry about water leaks and clogged toilets, so we should also include the cost of a property manager. In short, no thank you.
Raising the minimum wage would lead to higher prices, lower sales volume and lower sales tax. Is it possible to take that same budget and instead make more land available for development, lower the property tax, and make other moves to make home ownership more attractive? That should also lower the cost of rents.
Instead of bickering about wether the title is right or not, let's discuss solutions. To me the solution is very easy.
Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue (not profit, to keep silly games away) depending on the number of workers from that business requiring this kind of help. Businesses: Either pay a living wage to your workers or the Estate will garnish your revenues to pay it to them. But this silly game of gathering profits on the backs of the taxpayer shall end.
>Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue
Why punish the businesses specifically? If society wants to provide a minimum standard of living to its members, then the burden should be borne by everyone. Goldman Sacs certainly isn't paying the cost of this program, for instance.
This is why inflation hurts those on fixed or low incomes.
Which is why rising energy prices and increased taxation are bad for the same classes of people. Both contribute to raised prices, which puts people without equity investments at a disadvantage.
We need sensible economic policies. Without them, the wage / class gaps will continue to widen.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadPersonally the entire concept of "I own one of the basic pillars of your survival, pay me for shelter" never really sat well with me.
But if we're just making a value judgement on "deserved" I'd think the people who keep society together for the rest of us should get a pretty big seat at the table
It's not even positive to me that any specific group of non-minimum-wage earners are holding society together either.
Or the endless snarky remarks plastered on restaurants about "nobody wants to work!"
Napkin math shows that, to afford a $13.5k tuition bill, one must work 1564 hours for the university. They cap you at 20hrs/wk so as not to overburden you, so you can pay off your tuition bill in a mere 78 weeks. I go to one of the least expensive state universities.
A minimum wage raise would not be merely symbolic, at least not in Texas. If my university paid $12/hr, it would take 55 weeks to pay off tuition and at $15 it would take 44 weeks.
I don't know what the deal is with your university in particular, but your local Amazon warehouse is paying $15 an hour as that is their national minimum. Walmart just recently announced they are moving to $15 nationally as well I believe.
Tipped server jobs are actually in somewhat high demand around here since people generally tip well, especially with restaurants moving to those Toast PoS systems that prompt customers to tip.
I do wonder why that town has wages so far below what I'm seeing around. Perhaps this has something to do with it being a university town and having lots of unskilled labor? I also do wonder if it being a self fulfilling prophecy is also a possibility, if you get a bunch of people together who belive that wages are lower then they are, a savvy busineessman might make that belief a reality. Either way it's a interesting case study, thanks for sharing your experience and I will consider it further as I continue to look into this topic.
I personally have a remote sde job, so all of this is anecdata I've collected from those around me, alongside seeing job postings out and about.
Social housing is a different story. Where I live, it's notoriously hard to get into (waitlists of 8 years or more), has strict income requirements (get a raise? lose your home!) and is often poorly maintained because anti-poor city politicians wont make the investments necessary to improve and expand it.
Most other programs that we're told exist to help the poor are similar. They're limited, means-tested, complex to apply for, and often still short of what's needed.
Minimum wage is a ridiculous concept. Why make it illegal to accept wages below certain levels? The only thing it does is increase unemployment.
I'm not very strong on economics so mine is likely a foolish perspective, but I always thought minimum wage existed to prevent a race to the bottom where the bottom is asymptotic? Since there are companies getting away with paying minimum wage now, doesn't this indicate that they're fine paying as little as possible but also aren't lacking in employees? Corporations already have such one-sided power over job seekers (I know that I as a dev am guilty of forgetting this from time to time), I find it very difficult to believe that without a mandated minimum, there would be no shortage of companies eager to get away with paying even less. They're doing it now and being successful, why wouldn't they do it then and be successful?
And we can say all day and all night how "the market will correct this, no one will work for them!" but clearly since there are people working for the absolute minimum right now, there would be people working for the absolute minimum then too; the only difference is that the current minimum is set by the government and this theoretical minimum would be set by each individual corporation. I may not have a lot of faith in the government, but I sure know which of those two I'd rather rely on in this case.
But again, I have no formal econ education, so I'll confess I don't know anything about anything. Genuine question: how does minimum wage increase unemployment? Sure, if Alice was earning minimum wage, her boss could hire Bob at half minimum wage if Alice took a 50% pay cut, but how does that actually help Alice or Bob? Yeah, unemployment drops, but welfare claims and poverty levels skyrocket as Alice joins Bob in the welfare system. I just don't see it, but I'm clearly missing something.
I could somewhat agree with this argument if we had better sex ed, better access to contraceptives, and better access to abortions. All three are clearly getting worse in Texas.
I've removed it from my vocabulary hoping to do a better job asking myself "why do I expect that?" and "why would that be good?"
The study found that the minimum wage isn't enough to afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental.
Trying to compare average rents to minimum wages doesn't make sense, as anyone earning minimum wage wouldn't be in the market for an average-price two-bedroom rental. It would have been more useful if they had studied something like bottom decile wages compared to bottom decile rents.
Also, compare rents and minimum wage in say, 1979-1982 to now.
Yes, the study would have been more useful if they examined whether or not minimum wage could afford any two-bedroom, not the average two-bedroom.
It's the mixing of minimum wages and average rents that is misleading. We need to look at minimum wages compared to minimum rents, not average rents.
The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments.
It's just arguing about the misleading title...
There are another 3000 hunter-gatherers who have hoarded 90% of the resources. If we split up the resources more equally we could support everyone easily.
We have more empty houses than homeless in the US. We should be able to guarantee food, water, and shelter to every citizen, even if we don’t necessarily guarantee it’s in a place someone desires.
We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
How many people experiencing houselessness are you willing to ship off to rural Nebraska where they know nobody, have no support system, no supportive services, and probably are grossly unfamiliar with the local culture?
Is your answer "all of them"? Perhaps with some qualifier about how they'll receive food, water, and free transportation to this location?
You're absolutely right. Our society is unquestionably wealthy enough to provide for the basic needs of all. You are experiencing a beautiful blossoming of genuine human compassion. It's just perhaps possible that this might be a chance to think more precisely about how to translate that into policy.
We're not shuffling people around for the sake of getting them out of the area. we're shuffling people around so they can move to an area that has a better job market relative to local rents. This is supposed to address the "they can't move to find a better job because they can't afford the cost of moving" objection a few comments up.
>We have more empty houses than homeless in the US.
A sibling comment has addressed this so I won't go into this further.
>We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
Because it's a political problem (ie. NIMBY), not a economic one.
The solution clearly involves building sufficient housing and/or raising the minimum wage.
Making the numbers more right doesn’t make the reality any less cruel, and more accurate numbers don’t seem to help persuade anyone to care. So it’s legitimate to say “could be better!”, but that’s often viewed as important relative to the issue itself: people can’t afford a home in America.
As, per that definition, wages are now not normally distributed anymore it (statistically) does not even make sense to talk about average (i.e. mean) wages anymore.
More anecdotally: I recently looked up mean and median wages in Germany. And what I found is that the median netto income (per employer) does not really differ from the netto income per household. I guess that means that the average German household only has one person working (while the other is probably taking care of potential kids).
...and that's how you end up with polarization with media. Neutral/objective reporting gets dropped because it "seem to help persuade anyone to care". It's replaced with misleading reporting optimized for shock value which gets a pass from one side because it fits in with their narrative, but is rejected by the other because of how biased it is.
Should everyone be able to afford the average rent?
It is a moral failure of our society - where there IS so much wealth - that so many struggle so hard just to put a roof of their heads. It's a worse failure still that anyone goes homeless.
The reason you can't afford rent is because our housing policies make home ownership a highly-leveraged, government-backed investment that's guaranteed to appreciate exponentially forever
It's not appreciating, it's pacing real inflation, if you're lucky.
You can tell by comparing it to other significant $USD priced items over decades: gold, oil, healthcare, education, cost of a new car.
Housing isn't even outrunning the price inflation on new cars (a purely capital eating monster). In 2000 the average price of a new car was $21,000; today it's $41,000 (no joke). In 2000 the average home sale price (not new homes, any homes), was ~$205,000; today it's a bit over $400,000.
Most people get their asses handed to them in real terms on their home 'investments.' Inflation alone is enough to ensure they don't earn a real return. And then once you add in maintenance, repairs, interest, insurance and property taxes, forget about it. Housing as a good investment is one of the greatest financial frauds ever sold to the masses. It only works on average in fantasy if someone drops context of the total cost across 30 or 50 years. For the average person it becomes a very mediocre form of savings.
China's cheap manufacturing spared the US a significant cost of living beating over the past 20 years, by supplying a vast deflationary push down on US consumer prices. That shielded households from some of the currency destruction (inflationary) hit that is more widely reflected in the prior mentioned USD priced items.
Most homelessness is temporary, and there is a lot of assistance in a variety of programs to help people in that situation. Most chronic homelessness is tied to mental health issues and / or drug abuse among people who refuse treatment, and would exist independent of minimum wage and rent levels.
Source: an ex and relatives who work with the homeless community.
Handwavy nonsense. There are lots of places in the world where three or more people live in the space of a studio apartment.
The point being not that this is a reasonable standard of living, but that what can be asserted without support can be dismissed without support.
In the US, some CPS will require kids to have their own bedrooms. Certain states also have housing laws requiring kids of certain ages to have their own bedrooms, as well. Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
AFAIK, rules of that type in state law, regulation, or child services practice generally apply strictly to substitute placements like foster and prospective or probationary adoptive homes, not regular custodial family settings, and even then usually allow room sharing for all of infants with parents, with children under a threshold age (commonly 5 or a little older), and children of the same gender regardless of age, though there may be numerical limits to each.
If you can cite a specific rule or supportive case that not having their own room alone can be a basis for CPS action anywhere in the US against a parent with permanent custody, please share.
> Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
No, they aren't. In fact, subsidy programs often set a maximum number of bedrooms of a subsidized unit as number of people/2, rounded up to a whole number [0], absolutely preventing each child from having a bedroom unless there is exactly one child. Which is one reason the earlier claim about CPS is not true.
[0] for an example, see https://www.scchousingauthority.org/section-8-current-partic... — note that the 2 occupants per bedroom standard is a national HUD standard (stemming from the 1991 Keating memo, subsequently mandated for adoption as HUD policy by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998.)
In a single-parent family, one child wouldn't even qualify for a second bedroom under HUD guidelines. Now, its true that many child welfare rules wouldn't allow a placement to a foster or adoptive home that would force parent/child bedroom sharing, but neither would they prohibit it for an existing permanent family.
> The kids need another bedroom.
Again, if you have evidence such a rule exists, please present it.
This is changing the goalposts. It's no longer "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America" but rather "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America if they're single parents". Just for kicks you can extend this arbitrarily. Why stop at kids? What about your mom and dad too, for a multigenerational household?
By design and intent, it's supposed to be enough to raise a family on one income.
What’s wrong with there being a system in place that ensures that everybody, irrespective of having gone through divorce, or death, medical issues etc, has a chance to survive with a roof about their head and some food on the table?
A lot has changed since when it was first enacted. Most notably, families switched from single earner to dual earner.
No disrespect is intended to anyone, but by definition a person making minimum wage is poor and why can’t they live in a single bedroom apartment or even a studio. Where does it say that minimum wage = every occupant gets their own bedroom?
In large parts of the world families share bedrooms.
Please note I’m not saying these people should not try to better their lives, but people making minimum wage need to compromise.
I simply was trying to say that minimum wage has a definition, and I’m assuming that definition is safe housing and sufficient food and other necessities. I’m assuming that it does not mean a certain size of housing, designer clothes, eating out a certain times a week and so on, since after all by definition it is minimum.
2) Having children while on minimum wage is child abuse. Similarly, nobody owes them the right to have children, and nobody should be obliged to pay for such profligate hobbies. Perhaps they should devote the time and resources otherwise spent on child-rearing to create more value for others first.
Isn't that what the article is saying?
If you listened to the propaganda, you'd think it were 20% of the laborforce.
Which warrants a few other questions, including how many of those minimum wage workers are living with their parents rent free, what the average age of those workers is, and so on.
This study instantly becomes that much more absurd if you actually analyze the minimum wage worker segment. It ends up you're talking about 1/20th of 1% of the laborforce that it reasonably applies to.
This excludes 865,000 who reported making less. And a probably much larger number making local minimum wages. And any self employed or salaried workers who make minimum wage or less effectively. And anyone making the slightest amount more.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat44.htm
It's easy click-bait, but maybe a news organization and do some reporting on the actual living conditions for minimum wage workers since they're clearly living somewhere.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ect/compensation-percentile-estimates.ht...
If 10th percentile earners are renting 50th percentile housing, who exactly are the folks who are going to be renting say the 10th percentile housing?
I wonder who takes minimum wage jobs, even in 2016. There were plenty of 10$/hr jobs. You'd almost have to look for them.
The article really means a minimum wage worker cannot afford a 2-bedroom place. The larger problem is that in 93 percent of the US, they cannot even afford a 1-bedroom place.
It can be hard to find something smaller than a 2-bedroom place. We have torn down a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to create new Missing Middle Housing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
The real problem here is a general lack of housing stock of a certain kind: Smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that remain affordable and haven't become crazy expensive due to being part of an older vibrant area in very high demand.
While Texas and San Antonio don't have higher legal minimum wages than the federal minimum, effectively nobody is earning the federal minimum because nobody will work for the federal minimum. Even gas station clerks and grocery store shelf stockers in San Antonio make at least $12/hr. The "nice" gas stations pay $14/hr /starting/ and up to $18/hr. This is in one of the lowest cost of living and lowest median earning major cities in the US.
It's simply not helpful to compare the bottom legal possible wage to average costs for a two-bedroom rental, when the typical bottom wage is much higher and most individuals earning these wages don't rent a two-bedroom apartment by themselves, they have room-mates or are part of a family unit where the cost of rent is shared.
It’s almost like the middle class feels threatened like they’re being devalued or something.
I used to think that rents are simply a function of supply and demand, but recently I realized that there's also a floor for rental prices regardless of the demand. That floor is a function of the cost of buying a house, property tax, and the opportunity cost (eg: stock market will give me an ROI of X, so real estate has to be within that range or I'll just move my assets accordingly).
I am only familiar with the SF market so the rest of the country might be totally different, but having looked into buying a house there I can totally understand why the floor for rental prices is as high as it is. The property tax is 1.2%, and good luck with buying something under a million dollars where you can expect to attract people with steady income. Last but not least, if we're really going to compare this investment with the stock market, then I shouldn't be expected to worry about water leaks and clogged toilets, so we should also include the cost of a property manager. In short, no thank you.
Raising the minimum wage would lead to higher prices, lower sales volume and lower sales tax. Is it possible to take that same budget and instead make more land available for development, lower the property tax, and make other moves to make home ownership more attractive? That should also lower the cost of rents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841355
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850918
Why punish the businesses specifically? If society wants to provide a minimum standard of living to its members, then the burden should be borne by everyone. Goldman Sacs certainly isn't paying the cost of this program, for instance.
Get a roommate. Horrible, I know.
Which is why rising energy prices and increased taxation are bad for the same classes of people. Both contribute to raised prices, which puts people without equity investments at a disadvantage.
We need sensible economic policies. Without them, the wage / class gaps will continue to widen.