The issues starts to arise that people with two income households are more likely to lose one of those jobs and that puts a lot of pressure on the finances if you need both jobs for your house payment.
If both partners typically work: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
If AI makes everyone 20% more productive: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
If minimum wages lift the bottom earners from $7.50/hr to $18.50/hr: rent rises to eat nearly all the gain.
* landlords not wanting as much money (unlikely, although it happens at small scales)
* rent control-type policies
* competition
And as far as I know competition is the only thing that works at scale. Although, people tend to emphasize intralocal competition as where this gets fixed. But I tend to think that the even larger issue is that so many places suck to live in (due to schools, jobs, culture, lack of prosocial governance...) that everyone with options congregates in the good ones.
There's an effect every larger than all of those, though, which is wealth disparity. If incomes differ by fewer orders of magnitude then prices can't vary as much across markets. At the end of the day when rich people can and do buy 2-5 homes and everyone else can barely buy one of course you're going to have problems.
- competition from new builds
- competition from different locations
The first was killed by restrictive zoning. The second still exists but is no longer useful. You can move to West Virginia for cheap rent, but you'll have to move to a location without jobs.
The combination of far less people moving across states and of jobs concentrating in expensive places to live is what killed that second type of competition.
We do this in other industries all the time.
Health insurance is heavily regulated to ensure that there are profit caps (think 80/20 rule) this means that the company is legally compelled to actually spend a certain amount on customers of said product.
Imagine if landlords were compelled to spend 80% of their rent dollars in improving the space or helping the renters.
This notoriously does not work at all.
Look up pay-vider structure and the type of manipulation of medical loss ratio it enables.
You need more housing. Rents in Austin have collapsed because the city made it legal to build a lot more housing.
It doesn't work for landlords that just want to extract wealth from others.
Relying on private developers that only want to build luxury housing is kinda how we're in this current mess. Expecting them to solve the problem we know, build more housing, is just silly. They didn't do it when money was the cheapest it ever was the last 15 years, they aren't going to start building it now.
This is why the government needs to step in and build more/better public housing.
It works for Vienna, this young chap even speaks about it at great length:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVuCZMLeWko
I sure hope he goes into politics, we need people with this type of imagination to better our society and give us hope for a better future which we can create now, not later.
Landlords will get around this by raising other fees but not calling them rent, like pest control, garbage pickup, coffee room supplies, pets...landlords could do this all day long.
In your $100K scenario, that single person pays about $6K more in taxes, but has $36K more in take home pay per person, so that additional tax bill seems reasonable in light of their ability to pay it and pay for their cost of living.
the very first financial discussion I had with my wife (fiance at the time) was that we will always live off a single salary and 2nd salary will always go into future bucket (we tap in for larger purchases or fancy vacation here and there). I don’t think many families are setup this way though - in my limited personal experiences a loss of one source of income leads to sale of the house/condo and move (rent or downsize)