9 ms·

Minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in America

59 points by kareemm 5y ago

egberts1 5y ago
No minimum-wage worker deserves a two-bedroom apartment. of course, this is just a historical trend that is maintained to this day.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  Why not? After the last year and a half plus of them being hailed as "essential" and "heroic" for their "sacrifice" in keeping society functioning during the pandemic Personally the entire concept of "I own one of the basic pillars of your survival, pay me for shelter" never really sat well with me. But if we're just making a value judgement on "deserved" I'd think the people who keep society together for the rest of us should get a pretty big seat at the table
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    What minimum wage earners are "holding society together"? It's not even positive to me that any specific group of non-minimum-wage earners are holding society together either.
    - lelandbatey 5y ago
      Minimum wage workers like those stocking grocery stores and cashiers at said grocery stores are pretty close to holding the world together (I realize many are not minimum wage workers, but many are, or are close enough, that I believe it holds). If everyone who will organize and process transactions for groceries stores dissapeared, life as we know it would change immediately and for the worse.
      - oh_sigh 5y ago
        If they all disappeared, wouldn't someone else just do the job for minimum wage + $1? Unless of course they were afraid if being disappeared too.
        IntelMiner 5y ago
        That's something we're seeing now. Except instead of the + $1 it's "come in for an interview and get a free (old) iPhone!" Or the endless snarky remarks plastered on restaurants about "nobody wants to work!"
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        I suspect the minimum wage is quite well below the natural wage floor in most, if not all of the country at this point. Those cashier jobs pay over twice the federal minimum wage in my area, and I don't live in a particularly wealthy place. The only adults I've ever known that worked for minimum wage did so with other opportunities available to them, but took the part time minimum wage position in order to stay on Medicaid and collect other means tested benefits. If you were to raise the minimum wage to say $12 I'd expect the effect to be largely symbolic.
        jackson1442 5y ago
        I live in a fairly well-off place and most food service jobs pay about $7.25-9/hour, _maybe_ with tips. My university (3 hours away) pays $8.50/hr for most student positions, a cruel joke when tuition is $10k+/year. Mine is about $13.5k but I have enough scholarships to bring it down to about 3k. Napkin math shows that, to afford a $13.5k tuition bill, one must work 1564 hours for the university. They cap you at 20hrs/wk so as not to overburden you, so you can pay off your tuition bill in a mere 78 weeks. I go to one of the least expensive state universities. A minimum wage raise would not be merely symbolic, at least not in Texas. If my university paid $12/hr, it would take 55 weeks to pay off tuition and at $15 it would take 44 weeks.
        willcipriano 5y ago
        Tipped workers take some liberties with the income math. I spent a decade in the restaurant industry and front of house made considerably more than the back of the house while also paying less tax even though they were "only paid $2.75 an hour". Generally speaking cash tips are not reported and tax free, a server will make in excess of $20 an hour in a moderately successful resturant. The back of the house jobs now start around $13 an hour for unskilled labor in a hot and dangerous kitchen, every cent of it subject to tax. In addition by under reporting income, tipped workers often gain access to social programs that their true income would disqualify them from. I don't know what the deal is with your university in particular, but your local Amazon warehouse is paying $15 an hour as that is their national minimum. Walmart just recently announced they are moving to $15 nationally as well I believe.
    - muzani 5y ago
      The ones who are categorized as "essential" and allowed (expected) to work during a lockdown.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  You do realize that lots of parents work minimum wage jobs, right?
  - jiggunjer 5y ago
    isn't that when child tax credits and social housing help carry the burden?
    - ahoy 5y ago
      Child tax credits are fine, but if you don't make enough income to owe taxes in the first place they don't do squat for you. It's a credit, not a payment. The lowest wage-earning parents get benefit from them. Social housing is a different story. Where I live, it's notoriously hard to get into (waitlists of 8 years or more), has strict income requirements (get a raise? lose your home!) and is often poorly maintained because anti-poor city politicians wont make the investments necessary to improve and expand it. Most other programs that we're told exist to help the poor are similar. They're limited, means-tested, complex to apply for, and often still short of what's needed.
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        Where I live, a friend got into section 8 in very short order (pretty sure less than a year, I think a few months at most) and it was in a fairly upscale apartment building for the area. Also relied on other programs as he had a wife and newborn at the time.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        How fortunate for him.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    Surprisingly few in the US, given how much attention it gets. Something like 3-4% of employees earn federal minimum wage, a significant chunk of which are minors.
- blackboxlogic 5y ago
  I've been pondering the word "deserve". I translate it as "something the speaker expects and wants" but it pretends to be a reason. I wonder if it reveals which opinions the speaker has which they haven't yet bothered to find reasons for. I've removed it from my vocabulary hoping to do a better job asking myself "why do I expect that?" and "why would that be good?"
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Misleading title. The study found that the minimum wage isn't enough to afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental. Trying to compare average rents to minimum wages doesn't make sense, as anyone earning minimum wage wouldn't be in the market for an average-price two-bedroom rental. It would have been more useful if they had studied something like bottom decile wages compared to bottom decile rents.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Handwavy nonsense. If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom. Also, compare rents and minimum wage in say, 1979-1982 to now.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom. Yes, the study would have been more useful if they examined whether or not minimum wage could afford any two-bedroom, not the average two-bedroom. It's the mixing of minimum wages and average rents that is misleading. We need to look at minimum wages compared to minimum rents, not average rents.
    - plandis 5y ago
      Would it matter if minimum wage can’t afford you any two bedroom apartments? It’s not clear that it’s truly necessary to me.
      - tompazourek 5y ago
        The title says that minimum wage cannot afford any apartments, while it should actually say that minimum wage cannot afford average two bedroom apartments. The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments. It's just arguing about the misleading title...
    - 5y ago
oh_sigh 5y ago
1st percentile earners can't afford 50th percentile lodging? Why would that be news?
- _dark_matter_ 5y ago
  1st percentile? I doubt that. Tenth percentile is 11.26 [0]. That is still below the threshold mentioned in almost every area in this study. [0] https://www.bls.gov/ect/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm https://www.bls.gov/ect/compensation-percentile-estimates.ht...
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Ok fine, why would it be news that 10th percentile earners can't afford 50th percentile housing? If 10th percentile earners are renting 50th percentile housing, who exactly are the folks who are going to be renting say the 10th percentile housing?
deregulateMed 5y ago
I think less than 1% of people make minimum wage. I wonder who takes minimum wage jobs, even in 2016. There were plenty of 10$/hr jobs. You'd almost have to look for them.
- JohnTHaller 5y ago
  1.5% earn the federal minimum wage or less, down 0.4% from 2019. This excludes the workers in the 29 states (plus DC) with a higher state minimum wage. About 28% of the US workforce earns under $15 an hour.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
From the article: A full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom rental in only 7% of all US counties — 218 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide. The article really means a minimum wage worker cannot afford a 2-bedroom place. The larger problem is that in 93 percent of the US, they cannot even afford a 1-bedroom place. It can be hard to find something smaller than a 2-bedroom place. We have torn down a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to create new Missing Middle Housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ The real problem here is a general lack of housing stock of a certain kind: Smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that remain affordable and haven't become crazy expensive due to being part of an older vibrant area in very high demand.
tristor 5y ago
I think one thing that would help in this discussion is a realization of how few people actually earn minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is below the wage floor in every major city in the US. Here in San Antonio, Texas, largely considered to be a poorer / lower wage city, typical non-skilled labor is paid between $12-$14/hr starting. While Texas and San Antonio don't have higher legal minimum wages than the federal minimum, effectively nobody is earning the federal minimum because nobody will work for the federal minimum. Even gas station clerks and grocery store shelf stockers in San Antonio make at least $12/hr. The "nice" gas stations pay $14/hr /starting/ and up to $18/hr. This is in one of the lowest cost of living and lowest median earning major cities in the US. It's simply not helpful to compare the bottom legal possible wage to average costs for a two-bedroom rental, when the typical bottom wage is much higher and most individuals earning these wages don't rent a two-bedroom apartment by themselves, they have room-mates or are part of a family unit where the cost of rent is shared.
dawnerd 5y ago
Wow there’s a lot of out of touch people here. Just because someone makes a dollar over minimum doesn’t mean they suddenly can afford housing. Minimum wage is ridiculously low and should at minimum be enough for someone to work full time rent a reasonable distance from their place of employment and shop where they live. It’s almost like the middle class feels threatened like they’re being devalued or something.
aerosmile 5y ago
Everyone's first inclination is to raise the minimum wage (which I am not against). But let's not dismiss the fact that we could also work on lowering the cost of rents. I used to think that rents are simply a function of supply and demand, but recently I realized that there's also a floor for rental prices regardless of the demand. That floor is a function of the cost of buying a house, property tax, and the opportunity cost (eg: stock market will give me an ROI of X, so real estate has to be within that range or I'll just move my assets accordingly). I am only familiar with the SF market so the rest of the country might be totally different, but having looked into buying a house there I can totally understand why the floor for rental prices is as high as it is. The property tax is 1.2%, and good luck with buying something under a million dollars where you can expect to attract people with steady income. Last but not least, if we're really going to compare this investment with the stock market, then I shouldn't be expected to worry about water leaks and clogged toilets, so we should also include the cost of a property manager. In short, no thank you. Raising the minimum wage would lead to higher prices, lower sales volume and lower sales tax. Is it possible to take that same budget and instead make more land available for development, lower the property tax, and make other moves to make home ownership more attractive? That should also lower the cost of rents.
underseacables 5y ago
Why not get rid of the minimum wage altogether?
em-bee 5y ago
duplicates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850918
pepebuho 5y ago
Instead of bickering about wether the title is right or not, let's discuss solutions. To me the solution is very easy. Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue (not profit, to keep silly games away) depending on the number of workers from that business requiring this kind of help. Businesses: Either pay a living wage to your workers or the Estate will garnish your revenues to pay it to them. But this silly game of gathering profits on the backs of the taxpayer shall end.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue Why punish the businesses specifically? If society wants to provide a minimum standard of living to its members, then the burden should be borne by everyone. Goldman Sacs certainly isn't paying the cost of this program, for instance.
thordenmark 5y ago
In 1991, as a starving college student paying my own way I had to do something drastic. Get a roommate. Horrible, I know.
RickJWagner 5y ago
This is why inflation hurts those on fixed or low incomes. Which is why rising energy prices and increased taxation are bad for the same classes of people. Both contribute to raised prices, which puts people without equity investments at a disadvantage. We need sensible economic policies. Without them, the wage / class gaps will continue to widen.

59 points by kareemm 5y ago

No minimum-wage worker deserves a two-bedroom apartment. of course, this is just a historical trend that is maintained to this day.

IntelMiner 5y ago
Why not? After the last year and a half plus of them being hailed as "essential" and "heroic" for their "sacrifice" in keeping society functioning during the pandemic Personally the entire concept of "I own one of the basic pillars of your survival, pay me for shelter" never really sat well with me. But if we're just making a value judgement on "deserved" I'd think the people who keep society together for the rest of us should get a pretty big seat at the table
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  What minimum wage earners are "holding society together"? It's not even positive to me that any specific group of non-minimum-wage earners are holding society together either.
  - lelandbatey 5y ago
    Minimum wage workers like those stocking grocery stores and cashiers at said grocery stores are pretty close to holding the world together (I realize many are not minimum wage workers, but many are, or are close enough, that I believe it holds). If everyone who will organize and process transactions for groceries stores dissapeared, life as we know it would change immediately and for the worse.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      If they all disappeared, wouldn't someone else just do the job for minimum wage + $1? Unless of course they were afraid if being disappeared too.
      - IntelMiner 5y ago
        That's something we're seeing now. Except instead of the + $1 it's "come in for an interview and get a free (old) iPhone!" Or the endless snarky remarks plastered on restaurants about "nobody wants to work!"
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      I suspect the minimum wage is quite well below the natural wage floor in most, if not all of the country at this point. Those cashier jobs pay over twice the federal minimum wage in my area, and I don't live in a particularly wealthy place. The only adults I've ever known that worked for minimum wage did so with other opportunities available to them, but took the part time minimum wage position in order to stay on Medicaid and collect other means tested benefits. If you were to raise the minimum wage to say $12 I'd expect the effect to be largely symbolic.
      - jackson1442 5y ago
        I live in a fairly well-off place and most food service jobs pay about $7.25-9/hour, _maybe_ with tips. My university (3 hours away) pays $8.50/hr for most student positions, a cruel joke when tuition is $10k+/year. Mine is about $13.5k but I have enough scholarships to bring it down to about 3k. Napkin math shows that, to afford a $13.5k tuition bill, one must work 1564 hours for the university. They cap you at 20hrs/wk so as not to overburden you, so you can pay off your tuition bill in a mere 78 weeks. I go to one of the least expensive state universities. A minimum wage raise would not be merely symbolic, at least not in Texas. If my university paid $12/hr, it would take 55 weeks to pay off tuition and at $15 it would take 44 weeks.
        willcipriano 5y ago
        Tipped workers take some liberties with the income math. I spent a decade in the restaurant industry and front of house made considerably more than the back of the house while also paying less tax even though they were "only paid $2.75 an hour". Generally speaking cash tips are not reported and tax free, a server will make in excess of $20 an hour in a moderately successful resturant. The back of the house jobs now start around $13 an hour for unskilled labor in a hot and dangerous kitchen, every cent of it subject to tax. In addition by under reporting income, tipped workers often gain access to social programs that their true income would disqualify them from. I don't know what the deal is with your university in particular, but your local Amazon warehouse is paying $15 an hour as that is their national minimum. Walmart just recently announced they are moving to $15 nationally as well I believe.
  - muzani 5y ago
    The ones who are categorized as "essential" and allowed (expected) to work during a lockdown.
cratermoon 5y ago
You do realize that lots of parents work minimum wage jobs, right?
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  isn't that when child tax credits and social housing help carry the burden?
  - ahoy 5y ago
    Child tax credits are fine, but if you don't make enough income to owe taxes in the first place they don't do squat for you. It's a credit, not a payment. The lowest wage-earning parents get benefit from them. Social housing is a different story. Where I live, it's notoriously hard to get into (waitlists of 8 years or more), has strict income requirements (get a raise? lose your home!) and is often poorly maintained because anti-poor city politicians wont make the investments necessary to improve and expand it. Most other programs that we're told exist to help the poor are similar. They're limited, means-tested, complex to apply for, and often still short of what's needed.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Where I live, a friend got into section 8 in very short order (pretty sure less than a year, I think a few months at most) and it was in a fairly upscale apartment building for the area. Also relied on other programs as he had a wife and newborn at the time.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        How fortunate for him.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  Surprisingly few in the US, given how much attention it gets. Something like 3-4% of employees earn federal minimum wage, a significant chunk of which are minors.
blackboxlogic 5y ago
I've been pondering the word "deserve". I translate it as "something the speaker expects and wants" but it pretends to be a reason. I wonder if it reveals which opinions the speaker has which they haven't yet bothered to find reasons for. I've removed it from my vocabulary hoping to do a better job asking myself "why do I expect that?" and "why would that be good?"

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Misleading title. The study found that the minimum wage isn't enough to afford the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental. Trying to compare average rents to minimum wages doesn't make sense, as anyone earning minimum wage wouldn't be in the market for an average-price two-bedroom rental. It would have been more useful if they had studied something like bottom decile wages compared to bottom decile rents.

cratermoon 5y ago
Handwavy nonsense. If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom. Also, compare rents and minimum wage in say, 1979-1982 to now.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > If an adult with kids is making minimum wage, they need to be able to rent a two-bedroom. Yes, the study would have been more useful if they examined whether or not minimum wage could afford any two-bedroom, not the average two-bedroom. It's the mixing of minimum wages and average rents that is misleading. We need to look at minimum wages compared to minimum rents, not average rents.
  - plandis 5y ago
    Would it matter if minimum wage can’t afford you any two bedroom apartments? It’s not clear that it’s truly necessary to me.
    - tompazourek 5y ago
      The title says that minimum wage cannot afford any apartments, while it should actually say that minimum wage cannot afford average two bedroom apartments. The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments. It's just arguing about the misleading title...
  - 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago

1st percentile earners can't afford 50th percentile lodging? Why would that be news?

_dark_matter_ 5y ago
1st percentile? I doubt that. Tenth percentile is 11.26 [0]. That is still below the threshold mentioned in almost every area in this study. [0] https://www.bls.gov/ect/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm https://www.bls.gov/ect/compensation-percentile-estimates.ht...
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Ok fine, why would it be news that 10th percentile earners can't afford 50th percentile housing? If 10th percentile earners are renting 50th percentile housing, who exactly are the folks who are going to be renting say the 10th percentile housing?

deregulateMed 5y ago

I think less than 1% of people make minimum wage. I wonder who takes minimum wage jobs, even in 2016. There were plenty of 10$/hr jobs. You'd almost have to look for them.

JohnTHaller 5y ago
1.5% earn the federal minimum wage or less, down 0.4% from 2019. This excludes the workers in the 29 states (plus DC) with a higher state minimum wage. About 28% of the US workforce earns under $15 an hour.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

From the article: A full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom rental in only 7% of all US counties — 218 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide. The article really means a minimum wage worker cannot afford a 2-bedroom place. The larger problem is that in 93 percent of the US, they cannot even afford a 1-bedroom place. It can be hard to find something smaller than a 2-bedroom place. We have torn down a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to create new Missing Middle Housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ The real problem here is a general lack of housing stock of a certain kind: Smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that remain affordable and haven't become crazy expensive due to being part of an older vibrant area in very high demand.

tristor 5y ago

I think one thing that would help in this discussion is a realization of how few people actually earn minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is below the wage floor in every major city in the US. Here in San Antonio, Texas, largely considered to be a poorer / lower wage city, typical non-skilled labor is paid between $12-$14/hr starting. While Texas and San Antonio don't have higher legal minimum wages than the federal minimum, effectively nobody is earning the federal minimum because nobody will work for the federal minimum. Even gas station clerks and grocery store shelf stockers in San Antonio make at least $12/hr. The "nice" gas stations pay $14/hr /starting/ and up to $18/hr. This is in one of the lowest cost of living and lowest median earning major cities in the US. It's simply not helpful to compare the bottom legal possible wage to average costs for a two-bedroom rental, when the typical bottom wage is much higher and most individuals earning these wages don't rent a two-bedroom apartment by themselves, they have room-mates or are part of a family unit where the cost of rent is shared.

dawnerd 5y ago

Wow there’s a lot of out of touch people here. Just because someone makes a dollar over minimum doesn’t mean they suddenly can afford housing. Minimum wage is ridiculously low and should at minimum be enough for someone to work full time rent a reasonable distance from their place of employment and shop where they live. It’s almost like the middle class feels threatened like they’re being devalued or something.

aerosmile 5y ago

Everyone's first inclination is to raise the minimum wage (which I am not against). But let's not dismiss the fact that we could also work on lowering the cost of rents. I used to think that rents are simply a function of supply and demand, but recently I realized that there's also a floor for rental prices regardless of the demand. That floor is a function of the cost of buying a house, property tax, and the opportunity cost (eg: stock market will give me an ROI of X, so real estate has to be within that range or I'll just move my assets accordingly). I am only familiar with the SF market so the rest of the country might be totally different, but having looked into buying a house there I can totally understand why the floor for rental prices is as high as it is. The property tax is 1.2%, and good luck with buying something under a million dollars where you can expect to attract people with steady income. Last but not least, if we're really going to compare this investment with the stock market, then I shouldn't be expected to worry about water leaks and clogged toilets, so we should also include the cost of a property manager. In short, no thank you. Raising the minimum wage would lead to higher prices, lower sales volume and lower sales tax. Is it possible to take that same budget and instead make more land available for development, lower the property tax, and make other moves to make home ownership more attractive? That should also lower the cost of rents.

underseacables 5y ago

Why not get rid of the minimum wage altogether?

em-bee 5y ago

duplicates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850918

pepebuho 5y ago

Instead of bickering about wether the title is right or not, let's discuss solutions. To me the solution is very easy. Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue (not profit, to keep silly games away) depending on the number of workers from that business requiring this kind of help. Businesses: Either pay a living wage to your workers or the Estate will garnish your revenues to pay it to them. But this silly game of gathering profits on the backs of the taxpayer shall end.

gruez 5y ago
>Let's provide a supplementary help to any mininum wage worker to allow him/her to rent a two bedroom apartment AND any business with a worker that needs this assistance shall be hit with an additional TAX on Gross Revenue Why punish the businesses specifically? If society wants to provide a minimum standard of living to its members, then the burden should be borne by everyone. Goldman Sacs certainly isn't paying the cost of this program, for instance.

thordenmark 5y ago

In 1991, as a starving college student paying my own way I had to do something drastic. Get a roommate. Horrible, I know.

RickJWagner 5y ago

This is why inflation hurts those on fixed or low incomes. Which is why rising energy prices and increased taxation are bad for the same classes of people. Both contribute to raised prices, which puts people without equity investments at a disadvantage. We need sensible economic policies. Without them, the wage / class gaps will continue to widen.