US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes.
In India the cheapest new street legal car is the Tato Nano, around $2500 (maybe small electric cars from China even less). But the cheapest new car in the US is the Chevy Spark at $13-14k.
Building codes and zoning regulations mean there’s a minimum price you have to pay for housing in the US that’s around a factor of 10 higher than in much of the world (less than $100/month for a single bedroom apartment in a city in India vs around $1000/month in the US in a city… median is currently around $1200/month). And if you can’t afford that, and try to live in a tent even with the permission of a landowner, you can be arrested because sleeping in a tent is illegal and against code. It’s illegal to be poor.
Luckily we at least have some social programs. But we make people jump through hoops to get access to them. A time tax and something that becomes a lot harder or next to impossible if you have literacy problems or aren’t good at forms.
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> Building codes and zoning regulations mean there’s a minimum price you have to pay for housing in the US that’s around a factor of 10 higher than in much of the world (less than $100/month for a single bedroom apartment in a city in India vs around $1000/month in the US in a city… median is currently around $1200/month).
That's a pretty incredible take. Somehow so many people live in an ideological bubble, that no matter how varied the situation their explanation of the cause of the problem is exactly the same.
In the US, where the minimum wage is 10x that of India, the real value is land likely more than 10x that of India the explanation for why housing is more expensive is because of building codes. The claim is that 90% of the cost of housing is due is building codes.
I really wish people on got out of their ideological bubble more frequently. Some mantras get repeated so much people start believing they are true no matter how contradictory the evidence. It's not good for long term outcomes.
(Also, the land density per person is actually MUCH higher in India than the US, over an order of magnitude higher, which OUGHT to bid up the price of land even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... )
The reality is we make it illegal to be poor, whether intentional or not.
And then put meanstesting in social programs to target them, which has the perverse effect of making it harder for those who are poorest (ie least able to navigate bureaucracy) to get access to them.
And as far as ideology, both the left and the right seem to conspire to make this happen. It’s worse in cities than rural area due to obvious reasons, but within a city itself, both the mainstream left and mainstream right seem to back the regulations that make it illegal to be poor.
"Building codes" is used here in a very broad stroke. Yes, minimum wage is 10x that of India, which means the basic cost of construction labor is already 10x. If you're going to quibble the point, you make the point: 90% of the cost of construction labor is due to building codes insofar as you can't pay less than that, and that labor payment requirement exists deep into the supply chain. Insofar as minwage doesn't account for all the high cost, there are thousands of other laws edging up the price of housing. Insofar as that cumulative burden doesn't explain all the high price, there's more.
Having driven the price of housing up just thru laws directly & indirectly related to home construction (which can colloquially be referred to cumulatively as "building codes" for purposes of casual discussion), there's the psychological factor of "if I'm going to pay $X for that, I may as well pay a bit more and get more." Ergo the price bumps up further.
Having seen all that direct & indirect increase of price due to laws, we then get to the land. Again, psychology intervenes: if the price of the building itself has grown, the value of the land shifts too. One can casually assume that a house of some cost will typically be placed on land worth 1/10th that price. One is not inclined to put a $500,000 house on a $1000 property. Ergo, houses will tend to be built on land valued commensurate thereto - and housing & population growth will tend to get located on such property. There is "dirt cheap" land in the USA, but few are inclined to live there.
Further discussion would call for combing thru an itemized invoice for building a home, starting with land and labor, then similarly examining why each component is chosen vs legal requirements, and breaking each component similarly for legal and labor costs. I expect there'd be little surprise that, after analysis, US and other first-world homes cost as much as they do - given that the very starting point of labor is an obligatory 10x, and the same legal sensibilities permeate all of construction.
Consider that I could, tomorrow, buy a lot in my state for $1000 and put a new $10,000 camper on it. Instant home, owned outright. Can't do that because, broadly speaking, building codes.
If you're going to make the "bubble" accusation, please explain what's wrong with it rather than equally flippantly dissing the original assertion.
I understand the sentiment, but I feel like this line of reasoning puts oneself into a catch-22. The first reaction would be to say "well, let's start slashing regulations". However, I suspect people who support the idea that there are regulations that "require you to be rich" would recoil at the idea of trimming things like ADA accessibility, needing GCFI outlets in homes, energy saving fixtures, mandating a certain level of green construction materials, et cetera.
In essence, the people who fear that our regulations require a certain level of wealth would not, in my mind, want to actually deregulate the market because they see the each regulation individually as being a positive thing.
I currently live in a country where covid caused a shutdown and the government said they’d help and completely failed to do so.
We’re talking barely subsistence wages going to zero and the government promising relief but failing forcing people to beg and rely on charity.
The US social program for Covid were fucking generous.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/how-america...
Poverty line is a published official statement.
Percentile of world incomes, PPP adjusted, are easily found. Find and compare them.
"A $12,880 income in the United States has enough buying power to put you in the 84th percentile globally for per-person income" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...