Nation’s top three most expensive places for renters: all in Bay Area

That's getting to be a joke. My dad lives in a suburb (about 20 miles away) and it is so built up with new housing there are constant traffic jams everywhere. They have improved some of the roads (they are constantly working on them), but the number of new houses going in far outstrips the capacity of the roads. What used to be drives of a few minutes now, during the day, are often 30 minutes to an hour. None of the local cities are willing to deal with the issue, so it's just going to get worse and worse.

All of which are wonderful places for a centrist/libertarian/conservative white person to live. I dream all the time of having that luxury. Maybe things will go back to normal some day. But the political climate in this country has made practically any red state unlivable for someone like me.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive-housi...

> In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

Joking aside, scarcity is real. It works the same no matter how you feel about it. Descriptions of scarcity and related dynamics are just that, descriptive, not normative.

You can distribute scarce things in more equitable ways, but prices generally reflect physical realities that can't be waved away by a sufficiently woke fiat. Set the maximum rent at $500 and the minimum wage at $5,000,000 and we still can't all live in San Francisco's current housing stock.

People will get paid what the market will bear. Supply and demand and all of that. There is no "should", it doesn't enter the equation and as you can see with minimum wage, any attempt to out smart the market will result in inflation/deflation...

Lets say you have a single family home worth $2 million and you replace it with an 8 plex. You can sell each unit for $1M and still make a killing while also dramatically increasing the affordability of the area.

The answer is simple, but the NIMBYs are stopping it due to "neighborhood character"

Historically speaking, the interstate commerce clause of the constitution was eviscerated as part of the new deal for exactly this reason.

<<An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The US government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than the limits that he was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty.

In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce... among the several states").

The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us.... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'"[5]>>

Raising the minimum wage would raise it across the board, thereby allowing McDonalds to raise prices and remain competitive.

If salaries increase, the business will literally have to raise the price of goods sold or go out of business. That's different than raising the price to achieve a higher margin (and opening your self up to competition from people who can operate with a lower margin).

Essentially you are ignoring price elasticity — which of course varies depending on the product.

I look at four of my relatives who started a Salesforce consultancy, especially my younger older brother who started the whole ball rolling. Though a full-time Boeing 757 pilot for a major airline, he got a software degree, specialized in Salesforce work, started working with others, hired an initial team, and introduced several family members to the whole gig. The relatives founded a partnership and had around 40 billable, very good, consultants working with them, and had committed to longer term real estate leases. They had some marquee clients and a good reputation. Then they hit what hits a lot of family businesses -- intractable personality conflicts. (I'd joined this partnership briefly in 2013 but then bowed out after several months since I guess SFDC consulting isn't my thing and greenfield software constructing/craftsmanship is, and mostly because I sensed those personality troubles brewing.) So ... my younger older brother and younger brother both were left winding down this once-promising consultancy, taking low pay, risking a bunch of collateral (e.g., homes) they thought they would lose at one point, and eking out a low, but at least in the end positive, return. They each would have done significantly better just working on their own for the four years ... and I benefited financially by sticking with the startup world.

So ... I'd like to take a flyer some day on starting my own business one of these years, and I won't feel bad about taking some outlandish returns. If things turned out real well I think I'd pay "my team" more than had been promised them. But I've seen the risks founders take and admire that, and they deserve their gains.

External forces like starvation are not "threats of violence".

What you seem to be suggesting is that government setting of prices would improve things. This has been shown time and again to not work because only the parties involved can correctly evaluate the value.

Raising minimum wage slightly only has slight negative effects. If raising minimum wage really had no negative consequences you could raise minimum wage to $100 and it would be wonderful.

Where government has shown itself to be effective is being a third party that enforces the agreements made between parties, setting the limits of those agreements (e.g. no voluntary slavery), and making sure that the rules are consistent enough that people can make business decisions and rely on the outcomes.

The government just ruled that labor cannot collectively sue in a class action for wage violations. This is an incredibly bad decision, in that people should be able to group together and pool their bargaining as long as they are doing it freely.

My workers didn't put their names on the loans necessary to start the business. My workers are free to walk away from the business if someone else gives them a better pay rate, or if they just decide they don't want to do the job anymore. They don't get stuck holding the bag if someone's sick or has a personal emergency.

I want to pay the folks working for me well and appropriately, but if the whole thing blows up in our faces, the worst they have to deal with is finding a new job, where an owner has to find a way to pay off any outstanding loans and whatnot. Obviously it's not right to fleece your workers and pocket giant gobs of cash, but at the same time they did not take the risk in opening the business and thus the owners should get more. If they want the extra surplus value of their labor, then I would encourage them to start their own business.

They arent.

Because they are the ones taking the risk. People love to demonize companies, but they fail to acknowledge the thousands of companies that have failed, taking the owner’s capital with it. There is a survivorship bias because all of the companies we hear about are generally making a profit, but there are countless companies that have failed.

So why should the owners get the surplus? Let’s ask another question, why should owners have to suffer loses? Owners are on the hook for loses, why shouldn’t they benefit from the surplus?

Incentives play a major role in defining such a culture. It doesn't have to be a positive seemingly self-selected incentive to want to live in the suburbs, but negative ones play a major role as well, such as the insanely high costs to own property... due to severe limitations on developing high density multistory buildings in cities, which is why modern cities are exclusively full of either a mega skyscrapers or a single family homes. Or the ease of an automobile-first lifestyle - which is almost always a reaction to poorly developed mixed density urban areas, causing urban sprawl, not a cause of it.

Just because a lot of people have responded to opting the easiest options given to them doesn't mean the easiest option was the result of market/personal choices. Rather it was ultimately a result of the intention, or more often unintentional, side effects of government policy, not a prolonged series of personal choice.

This is hardly limited to just urban sprawl and land development. Thomas Sowell has a brilliant book on how this same cycle has been applied across US culture/politics/economics for decades after WW2 - well beyond just real estate - to nearly every major sector which influences modern US lives: https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...

If one considers government economic and social policy by their results, not simply their good intentions, this pattern can be seen in countless places. Yet the popular reaction by the media and political parties is so often to blame personal choice and 'unrestrained' markets for the output.

So naturally I am attuned to comments like this, and articles elsewhere, which talk about this subject.

Do you have any further insight into why you think there will be a recession in the next 2-3 years? Other than "it's a cycle and we're lined up for another one" ... Are there other market conditions that are making that more and more of a reality?

I get a loan for a rent house, I'll be paying it for 30 years.

I take your rent check, pay the loan fee, and invest the rest.

The market crashed. I lose my investment. My renters lose their job. No one can afford rent that matches the minimum loan payment.

Where is the real money again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is simply not viable or desirable to require the lowest skill jobs to pay enough to support a family. It has never been the case that the least skilled laborers in an economy were able to support families without support from other sources (e.g. a multigenerational house).

Min wage is the single-person poverty level, and is much higher now than when it was enacted.

No argument. But you seem to be making a value inference that low-value jobs aren't good enough to merit the worker a 2br place without two incomes. Why not? What level-sets what you "should" be able to get, for your low-value work?

I should go dig into the Greek Sophists. They probably had a word for it. They definitely taught it as a technique.