My immediate reaction to this statement was.. it's insane? In my opinion it should read 'a single person able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment within an hour of public transport commute.'
Otherwise it sounds like you don't think anyone should be able to live anywhere reasonable without roommates?
I think your confusing "should be able to" with "shall be able to, enforceable by law".
I don't expect that a 15 year old working his first job as a fry cook at an Arby's should be compensated enough that he can afford to live on his own. In fact, that could be dangerously disincentivizing his hard work toward his education.
He should be able to live; that doesn’t (for me) extend to “rent the average 1BR apartment for less than 35% of his gross pay, by law”.
He's got more money, so he can afford more expensive stuff, increasing demand, which increases prices, and now your fry cook can no longer live on his salary.
Do you want to respond by raising wages again? You're in a never ending loop.
This does not necessarily follow from the previous statement, and may even be completely unrelated.
The only way you keep this person's wage down is increase supply - have lots of people with university degrees. But that's not the real world, in the real world most people are not able to get a degree.
Again, the second part of this statement does not necessarily follow from the first. There are countless ways of tweak supply/demand of McJobs, such as low minimum wages resulting in a glut of retail locations , changing total hours non-degreed workers (read high-schoolers) can work, adjusting rules on temp workers, community college intakes, etc.
There a many variables, and increasing minimum wage impacting a subset of (mostly unskilled[0]) workers doesn't automatically mean an increase in income for skilled jobs.
0. I dislike the term, but it conveys my intended meaning. "Jobs that require no prior training" is unwieldy.
So, forcing an employer to pay him a "living wage" makes no sense. The rationale behind that law is invalid. You can invent new rationale, as you've done here, but it doesn't change the fact that his standard of living doesn't depend on his paycheck.
Other people think that the minimum wage should only apply to adults for some reason. Thats them changing rationales. We don't have a lower minimum wage for couples or higher minimum wage for parents. And that the 15-year-old isn't spending the money right now doesn't mean he won't spend it later.
But sure, If you really want I guess you could argue that we should t let teenagers work at all. After all, they don't need the money.
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I live in a neighborhood where the median income is below the national average by about 10% and above the national average by about the same amount. This implies to me that there are is a fair bit of economic diversity.
Also, I very rarely encounter a service worker that does not live within 25 minutes of the establishments in my neighborhood unless they do so by choice to live in a much hipper neighborhood.
Part of this is a university that stabilizes the real estate prices and attracts a lot of low income students who take on service jobs, but also a big part of it is housing diversity. Within 1 block of me are a commercial district, a high rise building, many mid-rise buildings, lots of townhomes and a handful of single family homes including at least 2 I’d call mansions. This housing diversity came about due to several phases over the course of over 100 years of urban planning that specifically centered on making it possible for lots of housing desires to be fulfilled in a single place.
It’s entirely possible if there is enough will. But that will is lacking.
My brain is not parsing this sentence properly. Could you elaborate a touch?
I'm reading it as "the neighborhood median income is, at the same time, 10% below and 10% above the national average income", which is only possible if both the national average and your neighborhood median is 0. I presume I'm reading it wrong.
The secret is Japan doesn't let cities run their own zoning, because they'd just use it to ban new people but try to keep the jobs.
EDIT: That's what Henry George said. The reason San Francisco land has so much value and the land in an undeveloped part of California has nearly none is the development, meaning the work of developing it, what human hands do to the land to transform it, the construction. You can sprinkle gold on it and nothing, put a bulldozer there (capital) and nothing, send an entrepreneur or economist to look at it and nothing. It's when people work that it becomes worth something.
Here is a radical idea. Build more houses. Maybe put them on top of each other so they don't have to be so far away from jobs. American love complaining about the inefficiencies of centrally planned economies, but then make one of the most important aspects of the economy, where people can live and work, into a entirely centralized way of doing.
No disagreement here.
>American love complaining about the inefficiencies of centrally planned economies, but then make one of the most important aspects of the economy, where people can live and work, into a entirely centralized way of doing.
Are they really centralized? NIMBYs aren't some cabal of shadowy billionaires, they're a grassroots effort by local residents. By that definition it's quite decentralized.
When they don't work, it's because it wouldn't allow the household to buy more stuff on the margin - but rather than "spouse earns so much their income doesn't matter", it's more likely "they wouldn't earn enough to pay for the services they have to hire". Which is a bad thing.
As in a roommate who murders hobos or who is a hobo that murders? If a hobo becomes a roommate, are they too stationary to still be a hobo?
A hobo is a migrant worker in the United States. Hoboes, tramps and bums are generally regarded as related, but distinct: A hobo travels and is willing to work; a tramp travels, but avoids work if possible; and a bum neither travels nor works.
> A character who wanders the gameworld, unattached to any community, indiscriminately killing and looting.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/murderhobo#:~:text=Noun,commu....
Think of how many people a big hospital employs, and how you'd need to organise living center if all of them had to have a reasonable living space within few minutes of commute. Now you need stores and restaurant there as well and the space to host the workers of these places too, etc. The only way is to build huge tower hosting tons of small appartements, kill all green areas to gain as much space as possible. People don't seem to like that idea that much.
Travel-to-work areas are circular-ish, and the available space for housing increases with the square of the distance. Accommodating a large hospital's workforce won't make a sizable dent in that. Compulsory tiny rabbit hutches in the sky it is not.
This is precisely backwards! Dense housing creates green areas, sprawl devours them. This should be obvious if you think for even a moment—-dense housing requires less land per person housed, which leaves more for nature.
I live in a cluster of small towns with a major regional hospital, almost exactly the situation you describe. After decades of sprawl, we’re finally starting to do an OK job of building dense housing right next to the hospital, and it’s saving a huge amount of wild space.
> Because the only way to guarantee that people have less than an hour of commute to their job is to create extremely dense population center
EDIT: in the context of applebees, i suppose there isnt an alternative hmmmm....
Think "people care" (and all the ramifications or that: babies, children, sick, elders + everything around that). All people working in stores (unless we exclusively want online shops). Transportation of goods. Building, sanitation, construction. Any job that requires specialised equipment (like factories), ... .
The whole idea that we can transition to a society where people don't have to move to get to work is an illusion. COVID gave us a false glimpse because most activities were closed or significantly reduced, so it felt like people didn't need to get to work anymore but that's just because they simply did not work. And it was not sustainable on the long run. We made the - right IMHO - choice to subsidise their income, wether directly via stimulas checks, or indirectly by helping their employers, but all that was based on the bet/assumption that we would be able to resume "normal society" and we would be able repay the debt we incurred over the next years.
To shift to a world of "mostly" remote work in reality means the smaller population of higher paid desk workers working from home, and everyone else having to commute to in person jobs.
Worse if companies don't adjust wages to match local rates (per the protests of many tech workers) we end up with deep income disparity between the remote workers and in person ones. Bringing many of the problems of a place like SF to all the other locations.
It feels like something has to give, or the society that results is awfully dystopian.