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Comment by iridium_core | Hacker News Reader

Why should poor people without jobs live in New York, one of the most expensive cities? Wouldn't it be cheaper and more effective to pay them to leave, and give them bus tickets to do so?

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Maybe that'll work when all poor people jobs are replaced with robots. But until then we still need janitors, fast food workers, grocers, and other jobs that currently pay at or near minimum wage. Unless you want to bus them in and out of the city every day which has other complications and borders a company store.

The obvious answer to me is that those jobs should pay a living wage for the area that they're in. Minimum wage in the USA is atrocious compared to most of the rest of the west.

not really true. Significant parts of Europe don't even have a minimum wages, in particular the ones American progressives keep referencing like Denmark, and instead rely on collective bargaining agreements. At the state level US minimum wage can be quite high (15$ in NY), the highest min wage in Europe is France, with 11€

But the market pays unskilled laborers $15 in the US (Amazon, Target, Walmart), which puts it ahead of all EU government minimums, right?

Also, those jobs do pay a lot more in the expensive cities. Remember the story of the San Francisco transit janitor who made $270k / year?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-janitor-pay-2700...

Because it's cheaper to serve people's needs in big cities than everywhere else. The suburbs are inefficient as hell and killing our planet.

People spend too much time looking looking at dollar amounts and not enough time thinking about the actual work being done. I'd expect better from what purports to be a site full of engineers.

Well, it's a rational thought, but you'll still be skewered for saying it out loud.

It's something to do with people thinking they should have an entitlement to live somewhere they've lived for a long time no matter how much it costs or changes around them. And makes it more expensive.

And policy makers unwilling to say otherwise.

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