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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

>There is no state, metropolitan area or county in the U.S. where workers earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom rental home by working 40 hours a week, according to the study.

This seems like an unreasonably high standard for a single minimum wage income unless they're using the excess here as a proxy for other necessities.

Edit: This seems unreasonably high because it greatly exceeds the standard of living we expect for a single minimum wage income household. Sure it would be nice if a single minimum wage household could rend a 2br but that's not what we currently expect them to be able to do. Saying "people who make X can't afford Y" when we didn't expect them to afford Y in the first place isn't very meaningful when you're discussing the ability of people making X to have a standard of living that meets our expectations for people making X.

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There was a time when one could. The minimum wage was originally put in place to make sure a single wage earner could support a family.

A time when unions were strong, when the 1% were taxed at ~90% and when "social security" and "pensions" were not evil words.

I feel zero sympathy for Americans and for the utter clusterfuck of misery that awaits them over the next 20 years. This is just the beginning.

There never was a 90% tax rate. That was a marginal rate, and there were massive deductions.

Would you name a country where 1% is taxed @ 90%? and what exactly would it acomplish so a google eng. would suddenly have 30-40K after tax income with 2 mil mortage that would really help make things right.

Google engineers are not the top whatever-percent that needs to be taxed like that, no. It's mostly the idle billionaire class. Warren Buffet agrees with me, FWIW.

What does it have to do with 1%? there are about 600 billionaires in US so they are like what 0.000001%?

>> 0.000001%?

No, 0.000184% (or 0.0000018, a factor of >180 different)

Marginal tax rates on very high earners were 90% in the US.

https://www.theblaze.com/contributions/the-myth-of-the-90-pe...

That exaggerates how much they’d be taxed, but generally speaking such governments provide more public services (eg health care, quality education) and also build housing. Even in the USA, HUD used to have a bigger budget than the department of defense.

Could you please stop with the unsubstantive flamewar comments?

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

"To better understand how rents and affordability have changed over time, Apartment List analyzed Census data from 1960 - 2014. We find that inflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64%, but real household incomes only increased by 18%." -- https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-...

The graph lower down on the page is informative, too: only in Las Vegas and Austin did the median rent increase equally to the change in median renter income. In every other urban area, the rent went up faster.

Source for that claim?

Minimum wage has been $4-10/hr (inflation adjusted) throughout its history in USA; only about as high for the single-person poverty level ($6/hr for single, $10/hr equivalent for a family of 3)

https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-minimum-wage/

Rent and home values have gone up far faster.

So has the size of living spaces and the space allocation per person.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

That article puts the average living space sq ft/person at 233 sq ft (959 sq ft/home) in 1938, 387 sq ft/person (avg 1,289 sq ft/home) in 1960, and at 1,046 sq ft (2,657 sq ft/home) today.

That is, since 1960, the average house size has risen 106%, while real rent has risen by 64% (https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-...) since 1960. This would seem to suggest that today's real dollar buys more living space than real dollars past did, but that we're also demanding larger and larger housing.

This is small comfort to the low-income earner looking for housing, of course, but it's nonsensical to expect real housing prices to remain static while the living space allocated to each home grows.

I don't want a big space though, I just want it within an hour commute of my job. Who decided we wanted a few bigger spaces instead of more abundant smaller spaces?

When I bought my house 11 years ago, I could get an older small house or a 21st century house that was too big. I wanted a detached house but I don't need surplus space and I certainly don't want to deal with extra heating/cooling/cleaning/maintenance on that unneeded space. This was in an affordable mid-size town away from the coasts.

I ended up buying a small house that was built in the 1940s. I still wish I could have got something with modern wiring and no lead paint, but the same compact size. I can't tell if people are really demanding larger homes over time (per cheald above) or if people who aren't custom-building are forced to pick from a size range that has offered fewer small houses over time.

Interesting. My theory is that as the exurbs developed and people moved further away from the cities, home sizes got bigger. For instance if you drive 2 hours outside New York you can find huge 3 story houses that cost much less than a tiny house with a tiny yard in the older bedroom communities closer to the city.

But then you have a terribly long commute and as you said crazy amounts of upkeep. I think millennials saw their parents dealing with this and they value living closer to the city.

There still are places you could. Skimming Zillow, you can get a 2br in Ohio for ~$450/mo.

To need two bedrooms on a single income I guess you have a child or someone else you are supporting like an elderly relative, and possibly a partner as well.

So that means attempting to support a family of two or three on one minimum-wage job.

Which was the status of minimum wage jobs up until the mid 1970s.

The average minimum age worker is 35, so it's not really fair to say "just don't have kids".

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.ht...

The price of the rental is derived:

==========

Fair Market Rent (FMR) is typically the 40th percentile of gross rents for standard rental units.

==========

A. If you are at minimum wage, look for apartments in the 5th percentile, not a mid-range priced apartment.

B. Most minimum wage, one-income households only need one-bedroom apartment.

C. Or, get a roommate, rent drops in half.

The minimum was wage enacted such that a single breadwinner earning minimum wage would be able to support a family. A family needs 2 bedrooms and a livable apartment, not the bottom of the barrel, squeezed in to one bedroom.

Do you have a source? The numbers don't back you up.

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

At least in the US this is not true. The very first minimum wage, inflation adjusted, comes out to something like $8k/yr in today's money (https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-minimum-wage/).

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).

I would like to see the comparison for the EU or Japan... I found this https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/06/where-europeans-spend..., which suggests it is more reasonable, but doesn't reflect the minimum wage. Maybe it isn't such an unreasonably high standard?

Yeah... why would you be able to rent a 2BR house on minimum wage. More like a shared room in a house.

Exactly, and I'm not sure where people's entitlement here comes from.

American 2-BR apartments in upscale complexes are HUGE (I've seen figures as high as 1300 sq. ft), and in Europe they would easily have a 3-4 person family living in them, with more than 1 person working.

> This seems like an unreasonably high standard for a single minimum wage income

Why should it be though?

Because not all jobs are that valuable. This is essentially replacing welfare by minimum wage, and why should welfare be administered non-progressively through employers instead of the government tax and redistribution?

Should it be illegal do do low positive value work?

Because not all jobs are that valuable.

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?

The market sets the value, obviously. Social welfare is great -- Medicaid, Unemployment, SNAP, WIC, etc, but shouldn't be paid directly by employers to recipients. Why should an unemployed person getting a low-value job suddenly shift all their welfare support burden from the state to their employer?

Conversely, you are arguing that a minimum wage worker should be able to rent a mid-range (40%) 2-bedroom apartment. Who is suppose to rent the cheaper 10-20% apartments? Why do you think the lowest 4% in wages of USA population deserve an average apartment?

Minimum skilled worker = minimum wage salary = minimum quality apartment.

That's a good consideration, but you're forgetting about the part-timers & the unemployed.

I'm not arguing that minimum wage should merit a 2br. I'm just challenging the notion that it shouldn't. There seems to be a sort of, "if you don't work hard and make lots of money, you don't deserve good things", built into that notion. When really, there's not exactly an intrinsic reason why a 2br is too good for a minimum wage worker.

If it's a tight city with high demand and not enough housing, sure, competition for scarce 2br is intense. But if there is plenty of space & housing, why not? SF is a microcosm, most of the country is not like that.

> Why not? What level-sets what you "should" be able to get, for your low-value work?

not_sure_if_serious.jpg

Figure out your housing budget, go on craigslist or another roommates website, and see what's available in that range.

If there are 10,000 people who want a 2-br apartment at $500/month, but only 1000 apartments, where will the other 9000 go?

Let's say we'll even construct the apartments for them, but that will take time. Where will they live during construction?

Why does that seem unreasonable to you? Seems to me that there should be tons of places in this country where anyone would be able to afford to rent a small house. That literally none exist is pretty damning.

I cannot remember a time when one minimum wage job was enough to rent a two-bedroom. I rented my first apartment, with roommates, in the 80's.

Minimum wage as adjusted in comparison to rent and home values, started going down in the mid 1970s, so that makes sense that you may not have seen it.

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