Renting 'is unaffordable to minimum wage workers in every state,' study finds

As long as I can remember a reasonable budget has been assumed to be 1/3 on housing, 1/3 on living expenses and 1/3 on savings.

I never really saw that as unreasonable. Are there people who think it's reasonable for an average household budget to be 40% living expenses and 60% housing?

poor people are not arbitrarily constrained to spend only 30% of their income for housing? Well that's true I guess, but I mean there's a reason why 30% is assumed as being good budgeting practice.

>the arrangement which I very comfortably made it through grad school in is apparently not possible.

yes, I think the arrangement I made it through on grad school would not be possible now that I am adult with a family. but sure if the conditions that held true for me then, age, no dependents, stayed true for all my life I could live as a poor person and only be a little bit desperate at times.

hey, did you ever like have a bad patch in grad school but think it's ok this is only for a few more years?

And I’m using the word literally literally.

You can make a case for some sort of relative poverty where they find hardship in renting which is absolutely true, but this clickbait title is just bullshit.

Unaffordable means you cannot pay. It doesn’t mean it’s hard to get by.

I'm not saying the study is good, but the lower the wage, the smaller the percentage of income remaining to spend on rent, because of basic cost of living, after a certain threshold all flexibility with income dissappears and cost of living dictates rent.

For high earners the cost of living is a small dent against their income, so percentage of income to spend on renting is a desicion about savings - this is not true of the lowest earners, it's a choice of eating.

Yep, it’s still not affordable in 93% of US counties for full time minimum wage workers to afford a modest 1BD apartment.

Full time work even at minimum wage can be hard to get in many places, where employers like Walmart deliberately schedule workers less than full time to avoid paying benefits.

Looking at those rental prices it looked very accurate to me.

The real problem is why would they compare minimum wage with median rental prices?

Both are distributions.

Nope. This is minimum wage and sadly there are plenty of people with an income lower than that. You have to chart both progressively and simultaneously.

Bottom %1 income to bottom %1 rent, 1-2, 2-5, 5-10, 10-20 etc. I'm not familiar with the data so those bucket sizes and positions are almost certainly capable of being greatly improved.

The next question, and the one clearly being examined is raising the minimum wage. Seeing how it affects everyone all the way down is informative there.

I have thought for a long time now that basic housing (your own private room with a door, heating/cooling, water and electricity) should be considered a fundamental human right and guaranteed as such by the powers that be. Without such a guarantee, the vast majority of us are going to continue to feel existential dread over the possibility that losing our ability to generate income could lead to being homeless.

Not saying homeownership isn't more stable than renting, but let's not make it sound like homeowners live in a utopia.

I could and probably will take a loan for apartment. But if there is market downturn and I lose my job and the value drops I might even lose the place and still have debt left over... Also I'm on hook for any large scale maintenace that housing corporation decides collectively to do. And this can be like half of the value of appartment. Plus as it is corporation I'm possibly also on hook if other shareholders(owners) fail to pay their share...

> People move up from those starter jobs, they don't stay there forever.

Please explain to me how that's different from a serf paying off their ownership debt, or a slave winning his freedom by defeating 10 consecutive gladiators.

The domain of “starter jobs” is rapidly expanding. It used to just be fry cooks at burger chains as well as newspaper boys, and before that we had farmhands, but now everything is a “starter job” that barely pays enough for rent if it does at all.

Basically the entirety of retail is a starter job. Even retail management barely pays enough to live. Delivery jobs are starter jobs. Customer support jobs are starter jobs. Work at a retirement home? Starter job. Many repair jobs are starter jobs. And plenty more.

You’ll see people 30, 40, 50 years old working these jobs. Still struggling.

[citation needed]

The phrase 'starter job' may indicate where you're coming from, attitudinally. For many people, of all ages, there aren't starter jobs - they're the only attainable jobs. And I suspect many people bounce around between different similarly-poorly-paid jobs, without significant moves up. We're talking about people for whom 'the grind' is just surviving, and for whom the American dream of self-improvement through hard work has died - if it was ever alive in the first place.

The supply issue is very real. Per the article linked below, 1 housing unit is being created for every 6 new jobs. It’s absolutely unsustainable.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/foreign-purchase...

The rents in MV are $4K ballpark for 2/2 which is a minuscule part of all those $300-600K+ compensations around. Today for tech workers the situation is much more affordable, be it rent or buy, than it was 20 years ago when i first came here. 13 years ago i bought townhouse at the peak for almost 6x my salary back then at 5.25%, and it was a bit of uncomfortable stretch. Today a tech worker for 6x yearly comp at 3% can very comfortably afford a pretty nice house here. In the recent years a bunch of tech neighbors and acquaintances have already bought their second [town]house. Of course the tech workers with these money sloshing around have been the major factor making it much less affordable for everybody else.

We also have a lot of black market labour. The unions have historically had a strong grip, but are under attack by political forces that want to undermine that market with unskilled workers.

And on top of all this I think that people simply always prioritize living expenses above all else. As long as there is less supply than demand, prices are going to rise until some are out-competed.

People will have to pay, either with their time or with their money.

Me neither, but I'm 100% sure it has a lot to do with golden circles teaming up to fuck the majority. At least it 100% for sure is in Ireland.

We have captured newspapers and TV completely reliant on government spending to stay afloat running glossy, thick, full-colour property pull-outs and programs.

At the same time our own government argues that building social housing would negatively affect the ability of property vultures to capitalise on their tax-free earnings.

We have a concrete cartel, protected by our government and courts for decades.

We have openly captured regulators, who stifle complaints and drag proceedings out for years or decades only to do nothing.

We have lawyers who are perfectly content to make bank off the above, and the tribunals that come when someone's actually caught taking bribes.

* We have > 230,000 unoccupied homes, at the same time as record-high homelessness and child deprivation. *

We have politically connected assholes making huge sums of money offering hotel rooms as emergency accommodation to homeless families.

I could go on and on. And, a huge amount of this is widely known among the population.

But what the government has here is an easy scapegoat. Every time they get caught bribing newspapers for fake news, or throwing crowded golf parties during a pandemic with vulture fund owners and judges 100 to a room, they just point the finger at Sinn Fein - a political party that has never once been in power - and talk about things that happened 40 years ago to rile up their aged base.

Oh, and our unions are weak and spineless. Not nearly as bad as American unions, but pretty bad all the same.

£300K for <40m^2, one bed, which is barely affordable to a couple both on median salaries.

Money laundering. It’s as easy as that. International organised and serious crime is buying up real estate to clean their money flows, typically from wholesale meth/cocaine/opioids and human trafficking.

Then they started buying up businesses and politicians and now we are here.

Construction companies build huge towers full of huge apartments nobody can afford, yet they are all bought up, and nobody lives in them.

I have personally rented long-term flats in a bunch of cities: Cologne, Stockholm, Oslo, London, Hurghada, Moscow.

Out of these the housing market in Stockholm was by far the worst experience (with the easiest being Oslo & Hurghada). There's nothing on the market because of rent control, official queues are impossibly long (O(years) for anything) and second-hand (third-, ...) apartments are an absolute mess (few tenant rights, tons of short-term contracts, lots of random small issues).

In Stockholm this hits foreigners especially hard as lots of Swedes have inherited a bostadsrätt or hyresrätt (the official equivalents of owning/renting property) and rarely deal with this directly.

In comparison megacities like Moscow and London are much easier to deal with. The market is rough due to often fierce competition but there are tons of properties available for renting and buying at any quality & price point.

ETA: Where there's a demand, markets open up. In the Philippines, many people live in "boarding houses" which is a small single room and shared bathroom. In one place I visited, it was a dirt floor, light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a bed which was little bigger than a cot.