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Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

>>"We can't paper over our lack of viable careers by creating low-skilled jobs that pay the same as jobs requiring a college education."

Well, why can't we? If we are saying that these types of jobs need to exist, why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?

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> why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage

Living wage based on locally inflated housing prices is just fundamentally broken concept. It is just ideological cover for wealth transfer from productive economy to landlords (by focusing on 'living wage' based on market housing costs and not on 'affordable rents' based on market wages). If there is an excess of workers and a shortage of housing, one cannot determine apriori where is a proper balance between 'living wages' and 'affordable rents', it is necessary to let market find the balance.

Ok, why can't we just say housing isn't a market, it's priced primarily for livibility and less for some concept of quality. Then living wage doesn't need to be opened to inflated housing markets.

Because there is an existing large class of people (2 in 3 Americans) who have acted based on the idea that housing is a market and have bought a home on that basis. They have no interest in altering the status quo. To add to that, you can't choose what housing is priced by unless you have government price controls and that is a cure that's worse than the disease.

Singapore has some pretty nice public housing. If there was a government policy that any time median rents climb above X, the state will procure land and build housing until it drops below that number again, it might be more workable than the blunt instrument of price caps.

I am a huge fan of public housing, not least because of the fact that I think that in the absence of a Land Value Tax, the state owning a large amount of land in high-growth regions is important for the public to diminish the impact of rent-seeking.

However, the practice of this is that these governments are highly corrupt, and usually conspire to use the mechanism of public housing as primarily a means to enrich themselves through the proxy of their construction contractors.

Look no farther than Dianne Feinstein and Tutor Perini.

Unfortunately, even the state gets caught up with the broken system of building approval with NIMBYist local interests control zoning and building approval.

https://ktla.com/news/california/its-insane-san-diego-county...

Public housing in thE US is almost entirely shitholes, though. It's better than being homeless, maybe. That's about it. That is the reason many large cities have torn most of it down and replaced it with section 8 vouchers. This scatters the ghetto-dwellers from their former high-rise islands into neighborhoods, which triggers flight by the existing residents since the people coming out of public housing are clueless about taking care of a property and being good neighbors.

That's entirely because of the way our procurement process works. We have separate capital and maintenance procurement processes. Typically, we splurge on a high capital budget (the cost to build housing) and then skimp or cut out the maintenance budget. Or worse, we expect the housing to be self supporting.

Public housing done right is distributed, low rise apartments rented below market rate and not expected to be self supporting.

As a tax payer, it's so frustrating to see us build good things and then totally neglect to maintain them.

I will say that high rise public housing in the US introduces complexity because it necessitates a degree of service infrastructure that's more costly than more, lower buildings.

I brought up Singapore's public housing model because in Singapore residents have the option to buy, so the housing is occupied and maintained by owners who are invested in the property. I think this would work well in California and would avoid a lot of the previous, designed-to-fail public housing systems we've tried. Singapore attaches their public housing to transit and doesn't have California's regulations for parking, which cuts costs significantly.

I own a home, and if it steadily loses value but my city becomes affordable for anyone who wants to live here, that seems like a pretty fair trade to me...

Would we own homes if they steadily lost value ?

I mean the house steadily loses value due to deterioration. But the land appreciates due to scarcity and the available financing.

>affordable for anyone who wants to live here

That doesn’t scale

I'm talking about how, in the transition between housing as a commodity vs housing as a public good there would be loss of value.

And I think people still would want to own houses. There's pride in being a homeowner for many. Knowing you have a place that is yours.

It does scale, because not everyone wants to live here. Some people want to live in nyc or Miami or Houston or Chicago, etc. There's a finite interest in any location.

Tell that to the people who will be underwater on the mortgage, only way this is equitable for all is if mortgage loan principle is adjusted in reverse in parallel.

That sounds reasonable to me. If we're working on decommodification of housing, it makes sense to assist folks during the transition.

Well, due to limitiations in supply, housing is market based on scarcity. There is no way to fix that without fixing the fundamental issue of insufficient supply.

Sounds good. Build more, subsidize buildings with lots of units, eliminate parking minimums, upzone popular areas, pay for public housing, and tax land in a way that disincentivizes surface parking lots.

All those seem doable to me, which would address your concerns. Any reason we couldn't do all that?

> Living wage based on locally inflated housing prices is just fundamentally broken concept. It is just ideological cover for wealth transfer from productive economy to landlords (by focusing on 'living wage' based on market housing costs and not on 'affordable rents' based on market wages).

Man, this is painfully true. Until California can decide between housing being affordable and housing being an asset that is guaranteed to increase in value 10% every year (which is what we've decided for the moment) every increase in wages is just going to be an additional subsidy for the top 1%.

No one is denying that independent contractors deserve dignity and stability. Imposing a forced employment framework violates the dignity of non-full time contractors who want a side income to supplement their normal job. This discussion also should account for the benefit to society of having safe and low cost transportation and delivery options, which raises the dignity of many people who otherwise could not afford the rates of for example taxis.

Living wage is a mutable concept and is determined in large part by where you live and how many children you have. Wages for a job are based on a fair market rate within reasonable bounds, like minimum wage. Raising minimum wage too high has adverse effects on job availability.

This is a story about a grocery store chain replacing their own employees who perform a job at the company, with "independent contractors" from a 3rd-party service. I'm not sure what case you're trying to make, whose dignity are you saying is violated? Who said anything about taxis?

Why are you arguing to me against raising minimum wage, when all I said was that people deserve a living wage?

> Why are you arguing to me against raising minimum wage, when all I said was that people deserve a living wage?

Well, you said:

> why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?

How do you propose that a person doing a "job" earn a "living wage" without making changes to the minimum wage? I sense much more of an argumentative tone to your comments than the person you're replying to, by the way.

As others have said in this thread and in many other places, the minimum wage does not really correspond to the wage required to live a comfortable and dignified life. It is merely the least amount of money an employer can pay an employee without it being illegal, and has very little to do with the cost of living.

If I seem argumentative, it is because I am exasperated with the gymnastics that people will do in order to justify the conscription of more and more people into precarious existences under a gig economy, which largely benefits people at the top of the economic ladder at the expense of those at the bottom.

If you are for a comfortable living wage, how do you propose it is ensured without a minimum wage at some, to be specified, level?

I'm a bit late in answering. I brought up the decentralization and deregulation of taxi transport (via Uber / Lyft) because I believe the impacts - significantly lowering cost and improving availability of transportation - are a net societal benefit, despite reduced wage stability. This improves public safety, creates incentives against drunk driving, creates affordable alternatives to lengthy public transit rides.

Grocery delivery is a similar case - for many, reducing the cost and improving availability of grocery delivery is a significant benefit. Instead of being the domain of the wealthy, it is massively more available to the average person.

"Living wage" is used to argue that people are owed wages higher than the market would actually pay. Lots of jobs pay vastly higher than living wages - not for fun, but because the supply of workers is more scarce and the economic output of the job is higher. Minimum wage is how we as a society have defined a floor for what is an acceptable job, which I think is intimately associated with the construct of a living wage.

Minimum wage is not based on a fair market, within reasonable bounds. I remember when minimum wage went from $5.15 to $6.25 in Louisiana in 2008, it's now $7.25 in Louisiana. You could get a lot more in 2000 for $5.15, than you can in 2020 for $7.25, and Louisiana is one of the cheapest places in the US to live.

Perhaps we could decouple benefits from employment so that 8 hours of gig work per day would actually add up to roughly the same thing as 8 hours per day of employment.

if we are serious about benefits for everyone then make it available to everyone: healthcare, retirement options, sick days, unemployment

remove the tax benefits around employer health plans, or exclusivity of 401k plans

Then it doesn’t matter if you have a hotdog cart, shine shoes or are a white collar worker.

Decoupling health care from employment doesn’t actually require making it universal. Private individual insurance would also work.

(I’m not advocating for this — I’m just pointing out that private insurance does not require employment, and the US could easily get rid of the incentives for employers to provide insurance.)

We paper over the fact that stocks and real estate are predominantly appreciating due to the low interest rate environment. It's the only way to keep the party (and economic growth) going.

I concur. It's rich to me that, for some problems, papering over is a completely legitimate approach to 'solving' the problem, but when the same approach is suggested in a different context, it is immediately dismissed.

Because the real economic value of those jobs is less than a "living wage."

A delivery driver is not a skilled job. I know, I delivered pizza when I was in college. And that was before mobile phones or navigation apps so drivers actually had to learn their way around their delivery area.

If you have a drivers license and a car you can be a delivery driver. That's not a very high bar. So those jobs don't pay very much.

Because. Capitalism.

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