Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

Unless you are living with parents, or with multiple roommates, the housing market in these cities will price you out.

We have this same scenario taking place in the area I live, and NIMBY/zoning laws prevent affordable housing from being developed. I've been to town hall meetings where people decry "affordable housing" as bringing Section 8 and "undesirables" to the area. You mention that even the local school teachers have to commute in from over an hour away due to afford a place to live, but it falls on deaf ears.

If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc.

That's because you're not offering enough money. Raise it by 20%, 50%, 200%. Keep raising it until you get qualified applicants.

You will eventually find a price that attracts the people your business needs. And if that price is too high to turn a profit and there's no other way, shut down.

Article after article with business owners acting like they're entitled to pay workers sub-market and/or sub-living wages.

Time to wake up and face the fact that large sectors of the service economy are no longer viable due to decades of misreported inflation, trickle-down economics, and disastrous, unchecked monetary policy blunders.

It's when their apparent value and their real value diverge that problems manifest. The solution has always been to let them deteriorate just like their physical counterparts. We have democracy with frequent elections to deteriorate power. We have inflation to deteriorate money. Where are the land value taxes that deteriorate land? Property taxes do exist but some states decided to freeze them, creating an extreme wealth transfer from the future to the past.

The housing crisis that makes the hiring crisis inevitable has been in the making for decades. If the price to rent ratio gets insane it will have to go down eventually, all at once instead of year by year. Of course it is entirely possible that people end up waiting half a lifetime for a correction.

If we want to prevent a crisis we have to do a little readjustment to reality continuously but people love to deny reality right until the moment it catches up.

Let's talk about a more familiar concept: Inflation. People hate it. They hate it so much they would rather see as little inflation as possible even if it comes at the risk of even more inflation in the future. The current inflation rate is a good example. It's high. It's definitively too high for a single year. However, when you look at the past 10 years it is just right. It's not high enough to raise interest rates because we have a lot of inflation to catch up on. We are like a student that forgot to do his homework and now has to do twice as much.

The housing market has a lot of catching up to do and when it happens it won't be pretty. Corrections are inevitable, we can only shift their date. I would argue that healthy markets merely correct themselves very frequently so the impact of every single correction is perceived to be insignificant.

Housing has become a commodity, an investment, and so the rich, with their sloshing, frothing waves of cash, are buying it up at an ever accelerating pace. Not buying it up so they can live in these homes mind you, but buying it up so they can extract rent, extract PROFIT from homes that are meant for people and families to live in. So now, rather than serving as a place for people to live, housing is serving as investment for the rich to get ever richer from.

The real problem is that when it comes to housing, the marginal buyer is now some hyper-leveraged corporation with near limitless access to cheap capital, or some billionaire investor, who'll happily bid 50% over asking as they're planning on renting the house out for the maximum amount possible and bundling their "Assets" into a REIT, and so they'll gladly pay over asking as its just a cost of doing business.

So now you've got the rich through their companies and trusts buying up entire neighborhoods, out-bidding regular folks for homes, raising rents to increase profits, and turning homes that people could once have lived in, into vacation properties and short-term rentals or worst of all letting them sit empty just so they can sell them when the value goes up.

Increasing wages is one absolutely necessary step towards fixing the economy, but real wages would have to rise 100%, 500%, a even f*king 1000% in a lot of places for regular folks to actually be able to afford the kinds of homes that a family could once have afforded on a single middle class income.

So literally the only thing that can fix things is to make housing worth a lot less. But that will never happen because that would cause some already fantastically wealthy people to be a little less wealthy, and the rich would rather people die and go homeless than ever be less rich.

That's the entire problem. Everything is tied to pay. The reality is that nobody can get good labor, let alone good skilled labor, at 20$/hour. If your business model can only work by paying minimal wages then your businese model has failed. Labor costs, wage expectations, have gone up. That is a good thing for employees. I have little sympathy for anyone who thinks they should be brought back down.

If you are in the lower income ranks it makes sense to check out of this system and not take these jobs. What's a a job good for if you can't afford to live with the income?

In the long run I think society should accept that lower income people also should benefit from a growing economy and not just the top ranks.

How can this rent increase be justified other than with unlimited greed? And the same people are surprised that people don't want to stay in a job with stagnant wages while their costs are rising at incredible opace.

I'm genuinely not being facetious: why don't they pay more? Isn't that the solution to a labor shortage in a free market?

That cook should be asking for a raise, right now.

His angle: "If you pay me more, I can probably find someone else I know to come work here."

Rent control and government owned housing tend to work less than increasing the housing stock. (Affordable housing problems only help a small fraction of people and raises the cost for everyone else slowing down new building)

So we are returning to factory towns? It seems the only solution is the cap rental prices, which traditionally doesn’t work.

Maybe the city should be buying at the housing and providing it?

There is another aspect to this though. Before I get to that, employers here in my small town are trying to bend over backwards to hire people including a local restaurant owner offering to let one woman bring her young (less than a year old) child to work since childcare is scarce. Another business owner offered "make your own schedule - just need one weekend a month" as they want a weekend to themselves. At the other extreme, you have people with little or know experience demanding more (even when stores are offering $18/hr) yet when hired - they don't show up reliably, spend time on their phones, etc.

At some point, the employment situation will work itself out, but there is a significant and consistent issue (across multiple fields) that a notable percentable of young people are entitled and have a crap work ethic. Just like companies wanting to pay too little and are getting bit by it, the lack of work ethic will come back to those showing such now.

If no one is applying for your jobs offer more money, that’s how supply and demand works.

> Las Vegas gas stations are running out of gas because there aren't enough truck drivers to bring the gas here.

Naive view here, but isn't this an indication that the job is not paying enough for the location?