The Wall Street Journal has a great infographic here comparing how many hours of worth it would take to pay median rent today versus in 1968: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-much-does-the-federal-minim...
Spoiler: it’s not pretty.
Spoiler: it’s not pretty.
The other half is that if they are too high they don't create jobs that pay minimum wage. You can't legislate private jobs into existence.
The more coherent argument against the minimum wage is that it destroys jobs which cannot be profitable for the employer at the higher wage. The problem with this argument is that the preponderance of research indicates a small magnitude for the elasticity of minimum-wage employment with respect to the minimum wage, generally around -0.05. If a 50% increase in minimum wage results in a 2.5% increase in unemployment in the cohort of people earning near the minimum, and if your aim is to increase the average wage for that cohort, then minimum wage increases do work. The idea that they don't is based on non-quantitative reasoning about the rightness of interfering with markets, or the virtue of work, or a value judgment about a small amount of unemployment outweighing an overall increase in compensation, etc.
I've elided a bunch of detail here, in particular the distinction between minimum-wage elasticity and own-wage elasticity, but this is a good starter:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impacts-of-minimu...
You can still find apartments built in the 1950s that are functional (places where the maintenance was done so they are essentially just as good as 70 years ago) and the rent is cheap. Most people want better.
The key information missing here though is a more generalized cost of living space per person, beyond housing. This data can still be biased, in general, because it may be the case that fewer people own homes, say more successful wealthy people, while the majority are renting these properties. I have a bucket of anecdotal examples of friends who still don't own homes in their 30s and are still renting.
This data would exclude all of those people painting a picture that people are doing well while some unknown population is renting, paying more per square foot than owning, and rates could be increasing per person per square foot over time. That population could be smaller or larger than those who own homes. I'd be interested to see those distributions of renting/owning and a similar cost comparison for renter square foot costs per capita.