Then I hope you would agree that we help that waiter the same way we help people who's home has been washed away in a hurricane, with some meager public assistance from disaster relief.
I agree it's insane to be spending that much on rent as well - but short of raising the minimum wage and using pricing controls to stop rent increases, what can be done about it? Cities hold the good schools and the good jobs, and people aren't being irrational by moving there and trying to compete. This is the modern financial tightrope we ask people entering the workforce to walk.
Say they spend an additional $200/month on a used car they own outright, just between the price of gas, insurance, and parking, to get to work, and this lets them instead pay $500/month in rent living further out in a townhouse with more roomates. The new $400/month savings rate this allows them, if fully utilized, still takes nearly 7 months to save up 3 months of sitting in your apartment doing nothing but paying $500/month rent + the $430 we said you needed for food and all other expenses monthly.
This isn't just hypothetical for me. I had the great fortune to work during college at significantly above minimum wage in a very cheap area, and saving for me was still next to impossible. I have a sister who hustled waiting tables for almost two years after her degree in NYC before building up enough connections to start her professional career filming tv shows. She is now paying down the debt she accrued with a much, much higher paying job, contributing much more to the economy than she would have had staying in our sleepy state.
These kinds of success stories take not only the kind of panache and grit people like to prescribe to the working poor, they also take the ability to take large risks and the luck that they pan out. My sister and I were fortunate to know that if we failed, we had loving parents who could catch us with a place to stay until we got back on our feet. It's true we worked hard, but without that safety net, and much other luck, I don't think either of us would have walked to the end of the financial tight rope of rent in major cities. I think people who walked across the rope without fearing the fall often just don't get it.