The study found that the minimum wage isn't enough to afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental.
Trying to compare average rents to minimum wages doesn't make sense, as anyone earning minimum wage wouldn't be in the market for an average-price two-bedroom rental. It would have been more useful if they had studied something like bottom decile wages compared to bottom decile rents.
Also, compare rents and minimum wage in say, 1979-1982 to now.
Yes, the study would have been more useful if they examined whether or not minimum wage could afford any two-bedroom, not the average two-bedroom.
It's the mixing of minimum wages and average rents that is misleading. We need to look at minimum wages compared to minimum rents, not average rents.
Making the numbers more right doesn’t make the reality any less cruel, and more accurate numbers don’t seem to help persuade anyone to care. So it’s legitimate to say “could be better!”, but that’s often viewed as important relative to the issue itself: people can’t afford a home in America.
...and that's how you end up with polarization with media. Neutral/objective reporting gets dropped because it "seem to help persuade anyone to care". It's replaced with misleading reporting optimized for shock value which gets a pass from one side because it fits in with their narrative, but is rejected by the other because of how biased it is.
As, per that definition, wages are now not normally distributed anymore it (statistically) does not even make sense to talk about average (i.e. mean) wages anymore.
More anecdotally: I recently looked up mean and median wages in Germany. And what I found is that the median netto income (per employer) does not really differ from the netto income per household. I guess that means that the average German household only has one person working (while the other is probably taking care of potential kids).
The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments.
It's just arguing about the misleading title...
We have more empty houses than homeless in the US. We should be able to guarantee food, water, and shelter to every citizen, even if we don’t necessarily guarantee it’s in a place someone desires.
We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
How many people experiencing houselessness are you willing to ship off to rural Nebraska where they know nobody, have no support system, no supportive services, and probably are grossly unfamiliar with the local culture?
Is your answer "all of them"? Perhaps with some qualifier about how they'll receive food, water, and free transportation to this location?
You're absolutely right. Our society is unquestionably wealthy enough to provide for the basic needs of all. You are experiencing a beautiful blossoming of genuine human compassion. It's just perhaps possible that this might be a chance to think more precisely about how to translate that into policy.
We're not shuffling people around for the sake of getting them out of the area. we're shuffling people around so they can move to an area that has a better job market relative to local rents. This is supposed to address the "they can't move to find a better job because they can't afford the cost of moving" objection a few comments up.
>We have more empty houses than homeless in the US.
A sibling comment has addressed this so I won't go into this further.
>We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
Because it's a political problem (ie. NIMBY), not a economic one.
There are another 3000 hunter-gatherers who have hoarded 90% of the resources. If we split up the resources more equally we could support everyone easily.
The solution clearly involves building sufficient housing and/or raising the minimum wage.
Handwavy nonsense. There are lots of places in the world where three or more people live in the space of a studio apartment.
The point being not that this is a reasonable standard of living, but that what can be asserted without support can be dismissed without support.
In the US, some CPS will require kids to have their own bedrooms. Certain states also have housing laws requiring kids of certain ages to have their own bedrooms, as well. Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
AFAIK, rules of that type in state law, regulation, or child services practice generally apply strictly to substitute placements like foster and prospective or probationary adoptive homes, not regular custodial family settings, and even then usually allow room sharing for all of infants with parents, with children under a threshold age (commonly 5 or a little older), and children of the same gender regardless of age, though there may be numerical limits to each.
If you can cite a specific rule or supportive case that not having their own room alone can be a basis for CPS action anywhere in the US against a parent with permanent custody, please share.
> Property owners who take government housing benefits are also required to make sure children have their own bedrooms.
No, they aren't. In fact, subsidy programs often set a maximum number of bedrooms of a subsidized unit as number of people/2, rounded up to a whole number [0], absolutely preventing each child from having a bedroom unless there is exactly one child. Which is one reason the earlier claim about CPS is not true.
[0] for an example, see https://www.scchousingauthority.org/section-8-current-partic... — note that the 2 occupants per bedroom standard is a national HUD standard (stemming from the 1991 Keating memo, subsequently mandated for adoption as HUD policy by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998.)
In a single-parent family, one child wouldn't even qualify for a second bedroom under HUD guidelines. Now, its true that many child welfare rules wouldn't allow a placement to a foster or adoptive home that would force parent/child bedroom sharing, but neither would they prohibit it for an existing permanent family.
> The kids need another bedroom.
Again, if you have evidence such a rule exists, please present it.
This is changing the goalposts. It's no longer "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America" but rather "Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America if they're single parents". Just for kicks you can extend this arbitrarily. Why stop at kids? What about your mom and dad too, for a multigenerational household?
By design and intent, it's supposed to be enough to raise a family on one income.
A lot has changed since when it was first enacted. Most notably, families switched from single earner to dual earner.
What’s wrong with there being a system in place that ensures that everybody, irrespective of having gone through divorce, or death, medical issues etc, has a chance to survive with a roof about their head and some food on the table?
No disrespect is intended to anyone, but by definition a person making minimum wage is poor and why can’t they live in a single bedroom apartment or even a studio. Where does it say that minimum wage = every occupant gets their own bedroom?
In large parts of the world families share bedrooms.
Please note I’m not saying these people should not try to better their lives, but people making minimum wage need to compromise.
I simply was trying to say that minimum wage has a definition, and I’m assuming that definition is safe housing and sufficient food and other necessities. I’m assuming that it does not mean a certain size of housing, designer clothes, eating out a certain times a week and so on, since after all by definition it is minimum.
2) Having children while on minimum wage is child abuse. Similarly, nobody owes them the right to have children, and nobody should be obliged to pay for such profligate hobbies. Perhaps they should devote the time and resources otherwise spent on child-rearing to create more value for others first.
Should everyone be able to afford the average rent?
It is a moral failure of our society - where there IS so much wealth - that so many struggle so hard just to put a roof of their heads. It's a worse failure still that anyone goes homeless.
Most homelessness is temporary, and there is a lot of assistance in a variety of programs to help people in that situation. Most chronic homelessness is tied to mental health issues and / or drug abuse among people who refuse treatment, and would exist independent of minimum wage and rent levels.
Source: an ex and relatives who work with the homeless community.
The reason you can't afford rent is because our housing policies make home ownership a highly-leveraged, government-backed investment that's guaranteed to appreciate exponentially forever
It's not appreciating, it's pacing real inflation, if you're lucky.
You can tell by comparing it to other significant $USD priced items over decades: gold, oil, healthcare, education, cost of a new car.
Housing isn't even outrunning the price inflation on new cars (a purely capital eating monster). In 2000 the average price of a new car was $21,000; today it's $41,000 (no joke). In 2000 the average home sale price (not new homes, any homes), was ~$205,000; today it's a bit over $400,000.
Most people get their asses handed to them in real terms on their home 'investments.' Inflation alone is enough to ensure they don't earn a real return. And then once you add in maintenance, repairs, interest, insurance and property taxes, forget about it. Housing as a good investment is one of the greatest financial frauds ever sold to the masses. It only works on average in fantasy if someone drops context of the total cost across 30 or 50 years. For the average person it becomes a very mediocre form of savings.
China's cheap manufacturing spared the US a significant cost of living beating over the past 20 years, by supplying a vast deflationary push down on US consumer prices. That shielded households from some of the currency destruction (inflationary) hit that is more widely reflected in the prior mentioned USD priced items.
It's easy click-bait, but maybe a news organization and do some reporting on the actual living conditions for minimum wage workers since they're clearly living somewhere.
Isn't that what the article is saying?
If you listened to the propaganda, you'd think it were 20% of the laborforce.
Which warrants a few other questions, including how many of those minimum wage workers are living with their parents rent free, what the average age of those workers is, and so on.
This study instantly becomes that much more absurd if you actually analyze the minimum wage worker segment. It ends up you're talking about 1/20th of 1% of the laborforce that it reasonably applies to.
This excludes 865,000 who reported making less. And a probably much larger number making local minimum wages. And any self employed or salaried workers who make minimum wage or less effectively. And anyone making the slightest amount more.