Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame | Hacker News Reader

Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

npr.org

58 pointsokasaki160 comments

Open articleView on HN

Housing theory of everything[0] strikes again.

Situation: Housing demand outstrips housing supply.

First order effect: housing prices go up

Second order effect: your FBI agents are now experiencing financial instability and worries

Third order effect: your FBI agents are now more susceptible to bribes

[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

It’s also worth noting where the money is going. It isn’t evaporating into the air.

Everyone talks about increasing numbers of parents helping their adult children from the angle of a moral failure by the children. Why doesn’t anyone stop to wonder why so many older people have so much money in the first place?

Older people have more money because they 1) Lived longer to accumulate wealth. 2) Housing was cheaper relative their income 30 years ago.

It's also worth noting that 50% of homeless people are over 50 [1]

[1] https://www.governing.com/urban/the-nations-homeless-populat...

Housing was cheaper relative their income 30 years ago.

This wasn’t some cosmic accident. It was a result of policy choices.

Fourth order effect: hiring more FBI agents to monitor the Third Orders. Fifth order effect: hiring more FBI agents to monitor the Fourth Orders. Sixth order effect: Eventually unemployment will be solved!

You are describing the TSA!

This sounds like the Okhrana.

the original Deep State

Housing supply is perfectly adequate. The prices are not, however.

If that were true, then many units would be empty. In my city prices are high but vacancy is low. So, how are the prices too high? People are paying them. If there were more supply, prices would drop, but laws prevent increasing supply.

> If that were true, then many units would be empty.

This is literally true. In SF as of 2023, there's roughly 60,000 vacant units. In New York as of 2021, apartments listed as available and unavailable for rent but also vacant was around 89,000.

To contrast, there was around 7,700 unhoused people in SF in 2023.

NY doesn't sound bad at all, there is roughly 10M people, given random estimate of 2 people per apartment, 89k, would be barely 2%

Edit: plus in NY you have all those HoA payments, so you pay really high price for not renting the place out

Yeah 89k sounds very low actually.

Once you consider apartments in between leases, apartments in Reno, and anything else without a certificate of occupancy, that sounds like the right amount for a hot market with low vacancies

The FBI has a long history of being a bad actor...

Everyone does over a long enough timespan

I expected the third step to be "shortage of FBI agents lead to deteriorated quality of service".

But what you described is far more scary.

And this is obviously true for all jobs that hold power. Combine it with bribery that can come from actors like Russia, Qatar, or China - this is an issue that must be fixed now.

The broader problem is lack of housing that can be afforded by the non-wealthy, which is caused in significant part by zoning laws. If more housing was available, the increased supply would better match the demand.

That is broader problem to solve, not taking account any civil infrastructure the houses will be bought by corporate rent company and renters will be charged "fair price" - pretty same as now (not long ago the was article with discussion about rent price fixing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39575803 )

Yeah, capital accumulation is an inherent quality of capitalism, and accumulated capital then controls the state making so-called regulation impossible. It's only a matter of time.

Only in certain regimes, like when labor competition is high.

The challenge is houses are the product of both capital and labor, so even if real capital returns are negative, you get stuck with high prices for construction.

Nonsense. Capital simply regulates labor competition to be low. Whether it's by increasing migration of cheap labor, policing worker organizing, company towns, regressive taxes, or many other strategies. There was one single period in history when this changed for a brief moment and capital learned its lesson to always use its power to keep the workers down. It has done so ever since.

I think it is more accurate to say that there is simply a larger supply of labor than demand for much of history, resulting in relatively lower wages, and favoring capital holders.

You see much higher wages in sectors where demand for workers outstrips supply. AI architects and neurosurgeons don't need labor organization to capture high salaries.

Also nonsense, but irrelevant regardless.

By exactly your logic, technology has always increasingly displaced demand for labor. This isn't new at all. So-called "reskilling" is always outsourced to the responsibility of labor. The professions you describe are regulated into scarcity on an ongoing basis by capital. Any exception to this rule is simply that. In the aggregate, capital accumulates.

I dont understand your objection. Are you saying that captital regulates AI scientists and Surgeons into scarcity, and that by doing so, they make more profit than if they payed lower salary to those professions?

For AI scientist, the data is not in and it's all financial speculation so a different conversation.

For surgeons, yes. The American medial industry is uniquely exploitative so invests a tremendous amount of capital in backing up its claims of prividing the "best" medical care (only for wealthy people). Of course, the American Medical Association and American Association of Physicians play their parts in contributing to the scarcity by lobbying for extremely expensive education requirements that can only be afforded by those with inherited wealth (with a few exceptions only via charity).

Just as the feudalist aristocracies, the capitalist bourgeoise pull up the ladders behind them. It only works when capital has an incentive. In the case of a few American industries like medical, those incentives are especially strong. However, such incentives do not exist in almost any other country, and salaries reflect this.

For Surgeons, you are conflating and blaming the actions of labor and the actions of capitalists.

I the AMA and AAP driving up is labor driving up costs in its own interest. Same as any other workers association or union working to restrict supply. Capitalists (e.g. hospital owners), have an incentive for lower salaries.

Similarly, its not the owners of salons that pushes things like 1,000 hours of training required for a barber.

Just because it is anti-consumer, doesn't make the person behind it a capitalist. My fundamental point however is independent of the reason for scarcity, but that labor scarcity itself is what drive high salary for those roles, and an oversupply of qualified workers drive down supply in other roles.

The root cause is the state or local govt preventing new housing. If there were enough housing, rent fixing wouldn't even make a dent.

Then why are rents going up drastically all over texas, even in small towns where damn near anything can be built?

Sigh, it is always supply and demand. If demand is higher than supply, prices rise.

It is a universal law of economics that people pretend doesn't apply to housing.

In these towns, do you have evidence demand is stable and yet prices rise?

https://scott-wiener.medium.com/yes-supply-demand-apply-to-h...

Adam Smith would disagree.

Thanks for posting relevant data. I have changed my stance entirely.

I would expect that someone discussing this topic would be familiar with the various things Adam Smith and others have said about collusion to increase prices and related topics.

Some/much of this may be just inflation and the devaluing of the dollar.

Never mind the small towns. Houston has no zoning laws at all, yet:

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2023/07/...

Houston has covenants which basically pick up the role of zoning laws. Famously they have massive parking minimums which prevents densifying.

IIRC Houston does not have zoning in direct sense of the word, but has a set of regulations and restrictions (e.g. on height, setbacks, parking minimums, lot sizes, etc.) that still drastically limits options for buildings.

That may be one cause, in some towns and cities, but it is far from universal. For one thing, demand growth has accelerated in many places, so building homes at a historic rate went from sufficient to meet to demand, to insufficient. You have flippers taking low-priced homes off the market, and you have AirBnb'ers taking other homes off the market (or not selling theirs when they move). There are higher expectations of what a house should contain (sq ft, # of bathrooms, closet/garage size, quality of fixtures) so lots of housing stock technically exists but is not really part of the supply for most buyers.

> but it is far from universal

None of what you said contradicts that. Supply is always measured relative to demand.

You wrote: "The root cause is the state or local govt preventing new housing."

And I'm saying supply and demand can get out of whack for reasons that have nothing to do with the government, they can even get misaligned under pro-growth policies.

The root cause is that houses are built for decades. It's impossible to plan ahead at this timescale. The alternative is to make standard places for stackable houses, with flexible infrastructure (electricity, water, sewer, road, parking space) to fulfil demand in days, instead of decades.

More supply often helps that problem too. It's easier to engage in price-fixing when there are only a few items of supply that are controlled by only a few. Once there are more options, it's much harder to obtain or maintain monopoly control. It's also much harder to hide illegal price-fixing schemes when you need to have tens of thousands of co-conspirators.

Well, as long as builders aren’t colluding to fix supply, it doesn’t matter.

Corporations can buy up all they want… but idle units are unprofitable. Between property taxes, borrowing costs and maintenance (which accrues whether units are empty or not), units need revenue or they are a drag on profits. Cartels fall apart very rapidly under these conditions.

Right now demand outstrips supply by a wide margin. This makes it profitable to buy and rent it out. Build enough housing to put some slack in the market and that equation will rapidly reverse.

TL;DR corporate ownership is a symptom, not a cause of housing supply issues.

NB: Here's one of many articles about this: "The hottest trend in U.S. cities? Changing zoning rules to allow more housing" https://www.npr.org/2024/02/17/1229867031/housing-shortage-z...

It's also caused by the idea that housing should be an asset to make someone else money, rather than solely a place in which a person/family can live. This leads to the AirBnB culture, the landlord culture, and compounds inequality whilst driving unaffordability.

I'm sure the idea is abhorrent to the USA, but perhaps removing incentives to be a landlord at every step should be considered... mortgages should be punitive on second properties, taxes exorbitant for rented properties, insurance should be unavailable, etc. Housing should experience disintermediation, those in the housing should be the ones owning the housing.

On this site my karma will suffer for saying this out loud, but a persons fundamental right to shelter, food, health... are just not valued in the US above someone else's right to profit from depriving some of shelter, food and health... at every level it's wrong, but yet capitalism seems to demand it.

To be honest, the opposite is also bad. Communist Poland had no landlords, all housing was built either by the state or by the people who wanted to live there, and apartments were basically impossible to get.

If private parties have no incentives or possibilities to build, you're left with government housing, and governments are prone to overpaying and underdelivering.

The only way to ensure a right to food and shelter is by ensuring that there's enough food and shelter to be had in the first place, something which we've seen socialist systems struggle with.

The only way is to build, build, build, and when the population density demands it, build tall and build small. Apartment complexes with 5-20 floors are a far better and far cheaper idea than sprawling suburbs.

If you look at home ownership data across Europe, the highest home ownership is in Eastern Europe, now... one can argue that culture has something to do with it but the numbers don't lie. I don't care what you call it capital/commune but if people can't afford homes, I don't think they care. The story doesn't matter if the effects are there.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

Sorry, but housing shortages were common actually due to lack of supply as thousands of people were moving from rural areas to the cities.

It was not caused by lack of will to build houses, but lack of construction capacity. Over time, the problem lessened and ultimately by late 70s it was almost unheard of to find a homeless person in a city. Even people with serious problems like alcoholism were housed almost always.

Unfortunately this resulted in lots of gray cheap blocks of flats. Looks drab. Over time also got improved.

Homeless people are around again and number is on the rise, shortage is around again. Very expensive "apartments" that are tinier and worse made than communist housing are sold for barely attainable sums now. They just look better on the outside.

As a counterexample, in socialist Yugoslavia, everyone and their dog got housing. Public companies made tons of it, towns and large part of cities were built during 60ties to 80ties. It was very easy to become the owner of a unit and most if not all became just that. It really wasn't a problem and people instead of worrying about housing thought about their hobbies, everyone on the coast bought/made boats, and people on the continent built summer houses on the coast.

Come nineties, oughts and today and the huge majority of housing units made are for tourism and speculation and are just empty most of the year. Landlords appeared too, some of those accumulating wealth from renting/Airbnb'ing their previously built summer houses, a lot came from money laundering/extraction. Housing itself has very little if any taxation so it became a wealth store and its just a big circle of socially bad incentives. Usually when there is a big political arrest it would turn our that the person had like 20 houses/flats/boutique hotels. Nothing usually comes out of it, but thats a different problem.

In the last 20 years the young people got totally screwed by lack of housing and many people emigrated unable to afford even to rent a flat and have some leftover money. Or to put it in the scale, more people emigrated than at any point in the last 150 years. People don't emigrate if they're fine with what they have. And politicians care even less because people who emigrated won't vote in the elections. And did I mention that most of them are landlords too?

My point is, a political system be it "communism" (quoting you), "socialism", "democracy" or whatever has very little with how they deal with the problem. The reality is usually much more complex than applying easy labels.

Penalizing landlords would lead to greater shortages and mass homelessness of would be renters. The houses simply would not be built.

You can't have a right to housing without taking away the right to property.

Renters are a Group that are already unprofitable to lend to, so banks would reject most and hike rates higher for the rest.

Your proposal only makes sense if landlords provide no service, but this isnt true. Just like how a bank makes a % interest for taking risk and providing capital that owners wont, landlords do the same thing. Landlords get paid a profit to take on risk and long term liability (to the bank), and again provide capital.

In short, banks loan cash to landlords because they are more credit worthy and take on liability. They in tern loan a home to renters, who have worse credit and much less liability.

It is all about paying a premium for others to take financial risk.

I'm sorry, but selling the landlord's literal rent seeking as a value to anyone but themselves is just blatant antisocial shilling.

Disagree. The economics are pretty simple.

If someone has a job but no assets, how do you expect someone to pay builders and materials? If they could, they would be an owner, not a renter. If they were credit worthy, they would be an owner, not a renter.

Renting is effectively a short term loan for the value of the house.

Try getting a 12 month loan for $1M without collateral, and see what the interest rates are.

Just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not broken. If we didn't allow speculation in the housing market, that person probably _would_ be credit worthy enough for a reasonable priced home.

The problem we're seeing in the housing "market" today isn't that people with no job or assets can afford a home, the problem is that prices have been inflated under speculation so much that we've passed the point where even a median earner can't afford a home.

You say it is speculation and scare quote the word market, but do you have any reason to believe houses are overvalued and not a real price?

My hcol house cost. $1.5M. The labor and materials to replace the structure are assessed at $1M,leaving 500k for the land. There are no empty lots around so I'm inclined to think that land in the bay area is worth that. I know I paid 500k to live closer to my job.

Can we please stop talking about "rent seeking" in economics before we learn what it actually means? kthanxbai

I happen to think landlording is a manipulative use of resources that leverages capital to perpetually inflict usury on people that can least afford it with little hope of raising themselves up. I've had half a dozen landlords in the last 10 years, and every single one provided absolutely zero value outside of their fortune to take a home someone else could live in.

In fact, in my most recent home with 12 zones of sprinklers built with zinc piping 30y ago, I had to personally replace half of the valves and a whole manifold so that I wouldn't have to choose between losing my deposit for the yard dying, or paying $1000/month to run the worn out system. I've had issues with every property I've rented, and every single landlord I had any beef with was more than willing to strongarm me using the lopsided law rather than manage their own properties.

Another story. I was a newlywed and went to sign a 6 month lease. 5 months pass and we want to leave, give them notice, and move out at the end of the month. Well, the teenager running the leasing office counted wrong and wrote it for 7, and when we went to turn the key in they told us we owed $1200. Sure, I didn't catch the error either, but they said nothing at notification and were unwilling to split the difference. They sent it to collections and just had the gov take it right from my bank account.

Or how about my rental before my first story, where they sent a sprinkler guy to "fix" the sprinklers, he checked out the issues I raised and said he was going to get parts. He never returned. Later that week I noticed that the lawn was terribly dry, I check the timer and turns out the landlord just asked the guy to surreptitiously unplug the controller so they didn't have to pay for the water.

And that's not even getting into the economic impact of usury on housing, and how every day its taking away the dream of owning a little something of their own from people that arguably put more labor towards keeping our society healthy than probably any of the data shuffling nerds on this site.

But hey, if you think it's great that people can't afford a home I guess you can consider it something different.

You're welcome, bye.

Also the definition of "usury", also that the plural of anecdote is not "data".

Landlords do provide value. The issue is that underlying asset they are renting is so massively and insanely over valued. If you could get housing for 10% of income, even 50% margin on top of that might make sense in many cases. As landlord would provide some value, like not needing to maintainenance and not needing to transact with property when moving.

Exactly. The main service/value a landlord provides is converting a massive down payment into a monthly payment and providing credibility to the bank.

Maintenance is largely ancillary.

Im a landlord. Maintenance is only like 2hrs of my labor per month. However, the unit purchase represents about 10,000 hours of my labor. The renter gets to pay maybe 40 hours of worth of labor per month.

You do not know what rent seeking means. Please stop using it in discussions about economics.

To be fair, they did say "literal" rent seeking. You just dont see as much outrage of "literal" rent seeking for cars, hotel rooms, equipment, ect.

You should check out what China did about landlords in the 20th century! It turns out that a lot of what you’re suggesting isn’t nearly as true as you might think. However there solution was a bit “break some eggs to make an omelet” but it seems like it worked out pretty well.

It is also worth noting that Maoist policy lead to nationwide starvation, and nearly all of it ended up being backpedaled.

What part do you think worked out well?

Can you please outline how you think measures to increase occupant-ownership/disfavor rentiership could lead to mass starvation? That’s rather a take.

Hmm, yes, the Great Chinese Famine: you say "break some eggs", Wikipedia says "one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history".

The great leap forward sure worked out well lmao. China's success came after they gave up on communism and embraced property rights and free markets.

> I'm sure the idea is abhorrent to the USA, but perhaps removing incentives to be a landlord

The problem is what will happen is that any US regulations around this will end up targetting middle-class “landlords” who rent out an extra home. And the real issue of huge corporate real estate holdings will be just fine.

It’ll scratch the itch of people wanting to beat down someone in their neighborhood, "boomers", etc who rents out something due to petty envy, but unlikely to solve the issue meaningfully.

A lot of average people buy real estate because it’s one of the few inflation hedges left for them.

If so, it'll be a great first step and a powerful beachhead to fight from. Making homes into investments, even by you and me in the middle class, is the exact moral failing underlying our problems and creates a positive feedback loop that cannot be stopped. If it's true this is one of the only inflation hedges left, then that needs fixing, not the protecting of usury.

>It's also caused by the idea that housing should be an asset to make someone else money, rather than solely a place in which a person/family can live.

Same argument for food, basic clothing, healthcare, education, transportation, etc. right? There is an argument to be made for communism, but it's not got a great-looking track record.

The problem is the FBI uses mostly the same GS pay scale as the rest of the federal government. So if the pay stinks for them, it also stinks for every other government agency.

And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.

Yes the gs pay scale also means these agencies use more contract workers who end up costing way way more. It's a dual world that exists

You’re telling me that an organization that has zero incentive to be efficient with money is being penny wise and pound foolish?

This is the same problem with violent and criminal cops - the lawsuits against the department are paid by taxpayers, not the offenders.

The people who make these bad decisions aren’t wasting their own money - they’re wasting the money taken from you and I by force. They have no incentive to stop wasting it.

That's not what's happening guy. The people setting the pay scale are bought out by corporations who want that money spent on themselves.

This isn't some avocado toast incident, not matter how much such a simple budget you understand

> You’re telling me that an organization that has zero incentive to be efficient with money is being penny wise and pound foolish?

All of these pay limits are capped by Senator's pay of $180k ish.

No Senator (or House Member) is going to vote for typical FBI agents to have higher salaries than themselves. What we're seeing here is the American people refusing to give pay-raises to our executive class / leadership class, and then the natural degradation of our leaders and pay-scales all the way down the chain.

We're well past due of giving Senators / House members a proper pay raise. Maybe then we'll actually have smart people running for these important positions again.

> The people who make these bad decisions aren’t wasting their own money - they’re wasting the money taken from you and I by force. They have no incentive to stop wasting it.

No Congressman or Senator will think that FBI pay raises would be fair, when they themselves aren't allowed a pay aise to a sufficient level.

Top end executive level FBI (ex: FBI Head) will be close to Congressional pay or maybe just a little above that.

Then, the rest of the GS scale builds down from there. By the time we get to starting salaries, its insufficient.

I don’t think this argument holds water. US lawmakers make millions of dollars beyond their salaries; the salary for the position is basically irrelevant. You could eliminate the salary and no fewer people would try for the job.

Conversely, you could 10x the salary and no more people would try for the job.

The paycheck simply isn’t a significant factor in whether or not someone wants to be a senator or representative.

> US lawmakers make millions of dollars beyond their salaries

1. For those where this is true, this is a MAJOR problem.

2. For those where this is false, this means that we're underpaying lawmakers severely.

> The paycheck simply isn’t a significant factor in whether or not someone wants to be a senator or representative.

Should it? I think the primary pay of Senators / Representatives should be their paycheck. Not dark money pools from who knows where.

You're basically accepting blatant corruption as if its inevitable. Erm... no. Lets raise salaries so that Congressmen can take up two houses across the country (one at home for their families, and a 2nd home in the Wash. DC area so they can do their job). And then increase the wages high enough so that "normal people" apply for the position.

Its not like the uber-rich, the independently wealthy, or the paid off bribed people are who we want as Congressmen or Senators. We actually want normies.

-------

Once Senators / Congressmen are at like $300k, which is high but reasonable IMO given the overall budget of the country, then we can work on the GS scale and Executive scale as appropriate. The FBI Director making only $180k can be raised to $300k, and then the layman FBI agent can rise above $70k.

The GS Payscale is a fine idea but only when the top-of-the-ladder truly represents the top. And not "top for government employee" but "top for the country", so that we're actually offering competitive wages and attracting solid talent in all areas of government.

Or we could just abolish representative government that was created to work around limitations in the predominant communication tech at the time, horseback.

The corruption does feel inevitable here as we sit and watch the federal gov rob the country blind while shamelessly enriching their families. No, I wouldn't take a rep's job for even $500k/year, and neither will anyone with the moral mettle to make changes, exactly because they can see the impossibility.

More money is not a solution to greed and self-dealing.

> More money is not a solution to greed and self-dealing.

Less money causes self-dealing behavior though. Because now there's widespread acceptance that the only way a $180k wage is worthwhile for our leadership class is if they take widespread bribes.

Drop the wages enough, and even FBI agents are going to have to self-deal to make their positions worthwhile taking. Be glad its only on the leadership class for now.

> Or we could just abolish representative government that was created to work around limitations in the predominant communication tech at the time, horseback.

That's not a serious discussion point until you say what you're replacing it with.

My discussion point is pretty simple. Raise wages on the top-end scale of government (ex: Senators, Congressmen, and executives like FBI Director) to $300k, raise the top end GS-scale to $280k, and let the rest of the GS scale flow naturally from that down to the bottom.

As I said before, the GS system and overall compensation of the government is actually fine. Its just that the top-end number is far too low, in part because of our ridiculously low wages that we grant to our top-level officials.

--------

> No, I wouldn't take a rep's job for even $500k/year, and neither will anyone with the moral mettle to make changes

I'd maybe consider it. But $180k is so low that I'd never consider it.

I've been dealing with the government salary situation for 15 years. Low GS pay is why we have to take bottom of the barrel for organization employees.

Contracts are gigantic and allow people to make great salary at a very low bar (because the bar is set by the low skill GS workers). What if I told you developers writing stuff like jquery, excel, ms access are making between 200-300$/yr. and I wont even get into what experienced people make. Basically the "official" system the one people see in public is extremely broke. What is crazy is I will see people say how high those GS salaries are, and then just chuckle if they ever really knew.

What is the alternative though? These orgs can't fall back to their GS paid workers, because they don't have the skills..so they are stuck. GS really does have to get a massive bump, and I fear anyone who thinks otherwise just lacks the experience in the matter, and I wouldn't expect them too because there's so many details that are unseen.

Yeah, we all work for the tech field here, don't we?

None of our bosses take anything less than what I'm asking for here. If anything, the numbers I've mentioned are lower than people should expect.

> Less money causes self-dealing behavior though. Because now there's widespread acceptance that the only way a $180k wage is worthwhile for our leadership class is if they take widespread bribes.

I think you have cause and effect mixed up. These positions would come with millions of dollars per year in job perks even if they paid $10M cash per year.

The perks come from the power, not the size of the paycheck. Making it bigger won’t reduce the financial value of the power they wield.

Also, even if it would, $300k is not a lot of money. You’re off by at least one order of magnitude.

For example, the CEO of Mozilla makes around $7M per year.

From what I've seen, this dichotomy is not too dissimilar from how private corporations will skimp on employee pay (SG&A/OpEx) while firing the money gun at consulting/contracting companies (CapEx) or doling out impressive offers for new hires on strategic projects. Different buckets of (tax-payer) money.

Not really. The problem is that pay is just capped. There's just a shortage of highly competent people across the entire planet and the only carrot you can offer is money. The federal government is banned from paying them market rate but not banned from subcontracting out the entire task.

NIST is trying to start up an AI wing with "accelerated" pay scales to attract talent. But even if they come in at the maximum allowable salary (~$317k), it's still about 600k short of being able to woo employees from OpenAI.

$73,000 starting salary is perfectly fine in the DC metro area. The problem is that the GS scale’s locality pay bumps haven’t kept pace with some truly insane areas.

I ran into this when applying for the US Digital Service. Their pay scales simply weren't competitive with the private sector (and I don't even live in SV).

USDS gives you an enormous network into tech/govtech though. As an intangible benefit it can be worth a stint if that is the direction you want to take your career.

It, supposedly, also gives you the experience and connections to start your own SBA-style consulting business. Contracting for the government requires knowing the right people to meet and the right paperwork to submit. It can be a very lucrative gambit if successful.

> And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.

It’s only a problem if you want the government to be spending even more money. They already spend approximately 1/3 of the GDP and that’s plenty big enough for many. If they want to pay people more, change the denominator.

Plus they have ironclad job security and a pension (which practically no taxpayers get), so it's not directly comparable to private sector salaries.

I believe their point was that FBI agents struggling to cover housing are more susceptible to external payments.

That’s true for all government employees and elected officials.

For Congress specifically, I’m in favor of raising salaries to $1M/year while simultaneously taking a zero tolerance policy on all lobbyist funded excursions. That’ll attract plenty of honest folks as the base salary would be more than enough.

I’m not opposed to this. but a more reliable solution might be extending terms to 6-8 years and then making second terms illegal.

People would still love to hire someone with experience in the highest rungs of government and it would decrease the negative influence of lobbyists on currently serving members.

Yes, but the FBI contains part of the US government's attempts to counter spies and infiltrators, and my understanding is that it's seen as especially important that those people aren't easily bribable.

I would think domestic bribes would be far more likely. Less risk to the agent due to less exposure to a high profile failure. If an agent gets pinched for taking bribes from a business owner or a local sheriff, it's not as big of a scandal as if they took foreign money. And probably easier to set up in the first place.

But what would the motive be there?

I don't think the scandal would be the main concern. The main concern would the life imprisonment that treason/spying, when discovered, usually leads to.

You'd have to ban all private sector employment, book deals, and basically any other means of money transfer. It's impossible.

The only way to stop corruption is to make the incentive structure altogether unattractive. Singapore, for example, has done a world class job doing so and has one of the lowest corruption rates in the world.

How does one measure the corruption rate? What even qualifies as corruption when it's so often "I know it when I see it?"

I'm not sure that math works out, with the amount of pork barrel the government hands out to contractors. Might be a lot cheaper to bring more talent in-house than to pay somebody else's margins.

As we see with the GOP, if there's not enough money to do a job, they'll get bought out by the highest bidder.

So it's a bit bigger of a problem when you're talking about government jobs with large security concerns.

Yeah. For 2024, a newly promoted Supervisory Special Agent (which, as the name suggests, is a supervisory position requiring years of experience as a Special Agent) in NYC makes about $150K including locality adjustment. That's probably ballpark for base salary for a new-promote (3 YoE) associate at a Wall St bank.

>In New York, for example, starting salaries for FBI agents hover around $73,000. But a nonprofit group in the city reported people need to earn at least $100,000 to afford food, housing and transportation there.

Does this hold truth? I know it's expensive city, but 73k is also median salary here, do they want to say that more than half people here cannot afford basic needs? That doesn't sound right

I knew people making 100K in California spending up to 60% of their income on housing.

Housing prices are destroying everything.

What about the free enterprise????

Housing isn't a free market; it's heavily regulated, subsidized, and politicized.

Houses are also not fungible. If people have a reason to live in a particular area (e.g., work, jurisdictional issues), and housing isn't regulated, you get places like Kowloon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/a/a7/...

The most extreme example the world has to offer is not representative of what would happen if the US legalized housing. HK has almost 200x the population density of the US and almost 100x the population density of California.

Slums can be found in nearly every country's history. Housing regulations are important: it's zoning restrictions that cause availability problems, not quality regs, and it's important to make the distinction. (When your community is exempt from zoning regulations, you can do things about the problem: https://macleans.ca/society/sen%CC%93a%E1%B8%B5w-vancouver)

But zoning restrictions on housing maintain the prices of existing real-estate "investments" (see https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-afford...). We're not going to have change until real-estate owners abandon the idea that housing is supposed to be profitable.

(Btw, I still think "don't build on floodplains"-type restrictions are important, even though those are also zoning restrictions.)

> We're not going to have change until real-estate owners abandon the idea that housing is supposed to be profitable.

"Housing can't be simultaneously affordable and a good investment."

Exactly. Regulations have made it so expensive and difficult to build housing in many parts of California (and other major cities in the US), that the demand outstrips the supply and it leads to unaffordable housing.

I keep seeing memes about housing costs in the 1960s being so cheap. I also wonder what the housing regulations were at this time. I'm guessing pretty light compared to now.

There was a lot fewer people back then, in most places the ratio of people to available housing was much lower. The network effects were also far weaker, expensive air travel and worse communications meant that people didn't move to big cities as often.

Regulation is the culprit, though. Even if you banned Blackrock, foreign investors, and multiple investment properties, rents would be unchanged because the housing stock is simply deficient near people's workplaces, and it's regulations that prevent that from changing.

Housing is a cartel with very artificially restricted supply. It’s not a free market.

Places in the US that allow housing construction to meet demand have more reasonable housing costs.

I make 200k and spend >60% on housing in California. Pay ~75k in income taxes,leaving 125k,then another 20k in property taxes, then 60k mortgage. Leaves about 40k for bills and retirement.

73k is definitely the median, but the disconnect with 100k is due to the shortcuts people probably take vs what the nonprofit reports.

For example, people may be getting roommates, living with family, Getting packages dinners, etc to make ends meet.

Also NYCHA (public housing) has hundreds of thousands of residents who definitely mostly make below 70k. That’s probably bringing the median down.

In NYC, you typically need to earn 40x the monthly rent in annual income to not need a guarantor. 73k / 40 = $1825/month in rent.

The median 1 bedroom apartment in NYC is $3,263 according to Zillow https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york...

you're saying people look at gross income to determine if someone can rent a place rather than net ?

This is common practice across the US and the rule-of-thumb 40x generally tries to take most cases into account. i.e., 40x after taxes and other typical debt levels is "risk appropriate" for landlords... Though don't get me started on how this reduces landlord risk to a level where they should not see profits...

It does seem odd though when you consider one person with 40x may have a completely different net than another.

Just off the top off my head I can think of

1. student loans 2. alimony 3. child support 4. back taxes to one or more governments

that can cut the net income of someone in half quite quickly

Yes

Yup!

It's just a heuristic to determine basic qualification: it's up to the renter to determine what they can afford once they're basically qualified.

The issue I see with comparing median salary to median rent for a one bedroom is that tons of people (especially young folks just starting out) want to live in desirable places and are willing to share living costs in order to do so. So even if you could magically reset a desirable locality to have comparable median rent and salary, very quickly rent would exceed salary as people that really can’t afford it move anyway.

And if you instead pin salary and say that the median salary at every company must be $X, rents will increase for the same reason.

I suppose you could ban living with roommates, and require median salary at every company to equal some state mandated number. I don’t think that will go well for anyone but you could.

It's also a problem because the median tells you nothing about who goes without. For that you need to know the distribution. Bottom 5% of housing cost vs bottom 5% household income is more informative.

You need to be "grand fathered" into proper housing to afford it.

My theory is that the churn of workers in the metropoles due to housing costs is why there are vacant jobs which made the workers move there in the first place. A self enforcing loop.

A quick google gives me median rent of $3500. After tax, 73k comes to about 54,599. Divided by 12 is 4,546 per month. So you have about $1,000 a month for utilities, food, gas/train, etc. It seems difficult to live on.

No one will rent to you if your rent would be 80% of your income anyway.

And on top of it that’s a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. Forbid wanting to have a 401k or some savings, afford any amount of travel or continue education…

The $150K number for a family of 4 sounds about right, but $100K for one person in NYC seems pretty far off. I have a lot of friends living in desirable neighborhoods making half that.

(The disconnect here is always around expectations: it will invariably be revealed that this includes a 1/2BR with no roommates within walking distance of the person’s workplace, when in reality much of this city has roommates and uses mass transit. Law enforcement are mere mortals like the rest of us; they can stoop to taking the subway to work.)

I don't think it's unfair to expect adults to be able to afford a 1 bedroom with no roommates

New American dream is a grown adult living with roommates like a child, and dying in a small box connected to a thousand other boxes that you’ll never even own.

I don’t disagree, but it’s not really about fair: it’s about what the expected standard of living is in NYC. NYC is historically a city of renters and roommates, and that is reflected in the split view between average “asking” rents ($3500) and actual rents ($~1700)[1].

This isn’t to say the city can’t or shouldn’t be more affordable. But the idea that everybody gets their own 1BR at average US rental prices is not immediately compatible with the city’s housing stock (or troubling trends, like dedensification).

[1]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...

In hindsight I really meant "unreasonable" more than "unfair"

For big cities I disagree, was it ever standard for single people to be able to afford 1 bedroom?

People were able to afford places, but being single for majority of adult life is semi-new trend. Especially in very dense cities.

I do. At least if you want to live in the popular areas, New Yorkers who make 73k can choose to live in a 1 bd in a cheaper area if they prefer.

I'm floored they don't get a military-style cost-of-living-allowance. Similar situation of being assigned to live in arbitrary places, but (pending short term problems caused by slower or inaccurate COLA adjustments than rent changes) it's not a problem for US military members, since their pay varies by location, specifically to avoid the problem the article highlights.

The GS schedule has location adjustments. They don't always keep up with the actual cost of living in a location. The NYC area means there's a 37% boost to pay, but NYC is not just 37% more expensive to live in than baseline.

Yeah, NYC is more like 10x compared to somewhere like New Mexico.

It’s a typical gov’t employment issue. It’s also why so many military bases and gov’t centers (except for HQ type areas) tend to be in the middle of nowhere - the folks who man them can actually afford to live there.

It’s also a huge kickback to Congress/house members (especially conservative ones), since military tends to vote conservative, and those areas also end up quite dependent on military/gov’t funding (Military Town, or industry town).

So they can lock in votes by keeping relatively well paid jobs/income in areas dependent on them doing so, and those people will be relatively happy because compared to other options they do pretty well. Most officers end up owning multiple homes (and renting them out) as they move around the country, for instance. Not sure about now, but even E5s can end up with a house in many of these places, and that’s only like $42k/yr.

The ones that get screwed are the ones low in the totem pole who end up in high COL areas, but those folks are usually pretty ambitious (hence why they are near the HQ/exciting area) and low overhead.

In Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and The Traitor he goes into detail on Aldrich Ames, a double crossing CIA agent who sold out US soviet assets to the Soviets (which led to 10 being executed) in exchange for Soviet cash. I think Macintyre called it one of the largest betrayals in US history.

He did this because he was struggling with personal debt and his new wife had expensive taste.

Feels like there should be a lesson in there somewhere.

There is no salary level that can guard against this kind of thing given “expensive tastes” can ruin even those who are perfectly well-off.

Isn't this a security clearance issue? I don't know how it's in the US, but when I've been involved in things like that, financial hardship is a big factor, as it can mean someone would be easier to sway if another actor proposed to fix their problems.

Inflation has been a killer. Someone I know wants to move out, but her old apartment went from $750/mo to $1250/mo in just a few years. That’s almost double. It might sound like an outlier, but I’m not sure there’s even anything sub-$1k anymore, and this is Missouri we’re talking about.

As for the rest of the country, $200k is the new $100k. It’s kind of shocking because I remember a coworker telling me how sweet it felt to earn $100k as a 23yo. That was back in 2008, and he was talking about five years prior to that, so 2003ish.

Grocery prices have also gone up substantially. $300 per trip isn’t unusual, and I remember it being around $200 max just over a year ago. I don’t think our spending habits changed much.

Employees should probably band together and force the market upwards. I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether to embrace the invisible hand of capitalism, and I’ve wondered whether unionization does work. It doesn’t seem to have massive downsides. And what other choice is there when your salary doesn’t match inflation? Go somewhere else? Well, that works for programmers, but the vast majority of the country aren’t.

Things will only get worse when AI does start mowing down jobs. I don’t think we’re close to that yet, but it’s one of those inevitabilities that we should try to plan for.

Capitalism may be the cause of some problems, but not inflation. Inflation isn't caused by free markets or the invisible hand, but by public policy and an oversupply of money being created by the state.

NPR running sympathetic stories for Big Brother, including the last paragraph framing opposition as supporters of Emmanuel Goldstein. He does not like MiniLove - you would be agreeing with him if you also did not like it just fyi.

NPR could have talked about the current size of the FBI budget, the costs associated with this request, the size of the current deficit - nope, straight to Goldstein.

And the financial insecurity that comes with it makes them a lot more susceptible to bribery.

Great.

On the other hand, it is absolutely insane that the minimum needed to cover a family of 4 is around $150,000. At what point do we accept that the greed the current economic model creates is pushing price inflation beyond unsustainable levels, and at what point do we stop this circus before everything collapses and we, as a society, loose everything we have? This really reminds me of [0]..

[0] https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/tom-to...

There is plenty of affordable housing in the DC metro area. A quick search online finds numerous homes and condos available for under $200k, which is well within the budget of an FBI employee. This is the kind of diverse high density housing that is so popular here, so where's the problem?

Why stay in FBI earning measly? That says A LOT about those kind of people. Either they are idealist or just plain doing "side hustle" like Danzel in Training Day.

We can afford to fund wars (while the military industrial complex gets rich) and bail out banks who sell junk mortgages (so bank shareholders get rich) and we can afford to house illegal immigrants (some of whom are enemy invaders, enjoying hotel living because it's the same cost of living as a crap apartment) but we can't afford to give the people who protect us a fair living wage (a lot of whom go into private security which is a national liability because it forces operators to go after the money just to be able to eat)

This country's priorities are all bass awkward and it's the government's fault. What do lawmakers even do?

Downsize the FBI and redistribute their budget to the few who remain.

Make corporate rental investment unaffordable. I heard majority of single family homes are owned by corporations. Is that true?

https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-bu...

Over the last decade, the number of investors purchasing single-family homes increased from 10% to 15% each year, with a spike of over 80% from 2020 to 2021 alone.

The FBI is too big... hopefully this will be a disincentive to not look for jobs there. Every state already has its own police force. There's no need for a massive federal agency to do the same type of stuff.

What about crimes which transcend state jurisdiction (try getting 12 different state police forces to co-ordinate and run thousands of investigations together and see how well it goes)? Or issues like counter-intelligence? Or areas where local police forces are corrupt and won't investigate?

What about when the FBI is corrupt?

Counterintelligence is CIA/NSA (who would never be in danger of that).

The CIA is not authorized to operate domestically, counter-intelligence is the remit of the FBI.

We’ll, that would help their agents afford rent I guess

We also have the CIA and NSA

Those are not law enforcement bodies. This is on purpose. We do not want them to be law enforcement bodies.

Both of those entities are forbidden from doing operations on US soil.

The spooks spooks, the DIA, don't even get brought up much despite them being such a big deal in terms of doing "james bond" shit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Intelligence_Agency

This doesn't mean that FBI will not have plenty of high paying workers as contractors, it just means that there will be less high quality FBI employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com