8 ms·

So rent a room and/or don’t live in the best part of the city. That’s what I did near Boston a few years ago. My rent was well under $1000. Do people think they

So rent a room and/or don’t live in the best part of the city. That’s what I did near Boston a few years ago. My rent was well under $1000. Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world?

rtlfe 4y ago
> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world? If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much everybody could afford an apartment.
- powerslacker 4y ago
  They aren't neccesarily designed that way, it is the reality of democratic local governance that real property owners in a community are naturally going to vote for measures that maximize the value of their property so that they can sell it once the land has a more profitable use than their own. When everyone votes for their own economic interest it tends to make real property more expensive over time.
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    You're just nitpicking vocabulary. This is exactly what I meant, and I would consider the laws and regulations that result from this process the "design" of a city.
iamdbtoo 4y ago
Yeah, that's kind of how this country markets itself. Being able to afford a home and a family on a regular worker's pay is literally part of "The American Dream."
- aerosmile 4y ago
  The American Dream is not about getting more for less, as in "most luxury for the least amount of effort." It's about having a shot at owning a business without the financial backing of a rich family [0], which is more like "most luxury for an insane amount of effort." [0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    > literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pempem 4y ago
      @Aerosmile I dont know that you need to look at Austria. You can just look at America over time. Mobility is getting harder and there's no real need to pretend it isn't
  - tcptomato 4y ago
    This is r/shitamericanssay material.
  - hodgesrm 4y ago
    The US is not a capitalist paradise. We moved a software company from the UK to a US Delaware Corp 2 years ago and it was a major headache involving substantial legal fees, accounting, employee benefits, and taxes. Texas interestingly has been the hardest to deal with--probably our biggest single accounting expense due to what seems to be antiquated tax management on their end. It was a lot easier doing business in the UK. We had relatively low accounting overhead, the laws were not hard to follow, and we didn't have to deal with having employees and customers sprinkled over a dozen state jurisdictions. We're fortunate to work in a growing and lucrative market, but it's not all peaches and cream.
- mepiethree 4y ago
  A home, yeah, not a home in downtown metros. My uncle is a teacher and owns two houses in rural Ohio with his wife, kid, and two dogs. Living the American dream.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    How many hours did he work to buy the house. How many will a new teacher have to work.
  - refurb 4y ago
    Pretty much. Not realistic to assume someone comes to the US with nothing and then buy a home in say San Francisco. The American Dream is typically "come to the US with nothing and build a comfortable life, no matter who you are". I still think that's possible. Guaranteed? Of course not.
    - nradov 4y ago
      A high percentage of homes in San Francisco are literally owned by first-generation immigrants. You can obviously see this just walking around and talking to people.
  - iamdbtoo 4y ago
    Why not downtown metros? Would you prefer to have a poorer group of people who can't live near where they work?
- pempem 4y ago
  I've thought a lot about this, esp as someone who was born here and whose parents immigrated here for the American Dream. They've done great. We lived in a rural area. It was possible because one of them came highly skilled and solicited to immigrate. That being said I shudder when I hear "just move to rural blah blah blah". My life was horrible there. I was considered black, egytian, non-english speaking, to come from a family of savages or royalty or witchcraft depending on the speaker. This whole "move to a rural place" really doesn't seem open to the non-white growing majority. Its certainly nothing like the Californian life I live now where I still cannot afford a home but can enjoy Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, Korean, and american culture in a form of acceptance that was fully closed to me growing up.
  - gurumeditations 4y ago
    Same with gays especially, you have to live in a city or live in hiding in most places.
    - pempem 4y ago
      Fully agreed ^
  - bigthymer 4y ago
    Care to expound some more on the differences between living in rural places vs. the Californian life? I've spent most of my time in the suburbs of coastal cities.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  That's a very different version of the American Dream than what I've always considered it to be. Even as portrayed in movies through rose tinted glasses it's always seemed to be the conjecture that even if you start with nothing, through a lot of hard work, thrift, frugality and determination you can work your way up through the ranks and eventually achieve a good living. They generally make a big deal out of the protagonist living a hard scrabble life while they're working towards their big break. Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
- lazide 4y ago
  Uh no. The American Dream has been about the ability to work hard to better oneself, and work UP TO that after education or doing something unique (like making their own business work and be profitable). Not that anyone could move here and just get it everything by doing the minimum.
  - pempem 4y ago
    What is the 'minimum' when every single corporation is working to de-skill jobs so that they can cut wages, limit onboarding etc. We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.
    - lazide 4y ago
      It's literally always been that way. Every business tries to cut costs, or they become unprofitable. Every organization tries to mechanize/create repetitive process where they can to minimize the amount of skilled workers they need as part of it. Every organization tries to skrimp where it can. I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies. Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation. Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see. And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  I don't know when that idea got started, but it seems like my grandparents' generation (The Greatest Generation) enjoyed the greatest benefits of it, then my parents' generation benefited but also inherited their parents' wealth. As a GenX person, I watched my cohort struggle well more than their boomer parents' cohort. The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.
- thedailymail 4y ago
  Completely anecdotal, but my maternal grandfather was a first-generation immigrant at the turn of the 20th century, speaking no English, no family, no job - the whole cliché. He did various jobs - fireman, train conductor, court stenographer - none of which would be particularly high-income or high-prestige today. But by the 1960s he had managed to raise 12 children with my grandmother, a stay-at-home mother, and to pay off both a 10-room home in the suburbs of NYC and an 80-acre vacation place in the Catskills. The heroic labor of immigrants notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that would be possible for a fresh-off-the-boater today. I told my 20-something kids about it and they just laughed, like hearing about someone who stumbled across a pot of gold or a magic goose in a fairytale. I can't say I blame them.
pc86 4y ago
> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world? Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning subreddit that even starts approaching discussions of renting, or landlords, or landlord-tenant relations, and you'll get flooded with comments so detached from reality it will stun you.
- Spivak 4y ago
  If you can’t afford to live in the city where you work then it’s pretty much the definition of “not a living wage.” Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    How? If you can travel back and forth and that makes it work, what is the problem? You can hate it, sure, but, at least where I live, people commute 3+ hours/day to make a nice living while living cheap. What is wrong with that?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      The increase in the world’s entropy is not priced into the commuting costs, so it is artificially cheap living. Assuming an inhabitable planet with clean air and water is a goal, then commuting 3 hours would not be cheap.
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        You are right, but you can stimulate wfh and stimulate companies to spread out more. The fact a lot of people are against that (including here on HN) shows that it's all great, but not in my backyard.
  - nameisname 4y ago
    It's not the wage that needs to change it would be the prices of housing in the city. This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body. It's called gentrification. It's currently happening to me. I could not afford to buy my house now and I just bought it a few years ago. Of course there still needs to be staff in the area working retail etc. but I haven't seen anyone over 25 in a store near me for over a year.
bruce343434 4y ago
Logical fallacy detected: false dichotomy
Spivak 4y ago
If your job is in that city then yeah kinda. Workers today are so entitled, demanding an entire studio apartment the audacity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cloverich 4y ago
  It’s been a while for me but i always remember single person apartments (even studios) being relatively more expensive than multi bedroom with roommates. Anytime I wanted to save money that was always the first place i started. In that sense i personally would consider an apartment all to yourself a relative luxury.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Sorry, I’m biased because I’ve literally never lived alone. Didn’t even cross my mind that one person’s salary can afford an apartment. When I say an entire studio apartment to yourself an entire studio apartment for you and your roommate or partner.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    If it has been a while for you, then perhaps you were much younger and comfortable sharing a living space with relative strangers. Many people working these crappy jobs are not kids in their teens and twenties. They are middle-aged and these are their careers. Also, the workers we are talking about don't "want to save money", they are perpetually spending every cent they earn to cover costs and debt. It isn't some pit stop on the way to the upper-middle class (though upper-middle class people seem to like to pretend it is).
rdiddly 4y ago
I mostly agree, although are Amazon warehouses in the most expensive cities? My understanding was that they were big and therefore located in spread-out suburban food-deserts poorly served by public transit, where land is cheap and available, and the zoning is lax if you're building an Amazon warehouse and "bringing jobs" but strangely prohibitive if you're thinking of building apartments. Anyway just penciling out the math, a $15/hr wage ($31K/yr) puts you in the 12% federal tax bracket and the 4% California (for example) state tax bracket. So your take-home would be $15/hr x 2080 hrs/yr x (1 - 0.12 - 0.04) = $26.2K/yr. So at that point rent ($1K/mo = $12K/year) is a good 45% of your take-home pay, and you've got $14.2K left to pay food, utilities, transportation, and (hopefully not) healthcare. It can be done. Each thing tends to trade off with other things. For example, to avoid healthcare expenses you'll want to stay healthy, eating healthy food for example. But healthy food is expensive, and probably not located close by your shitty part of town, so you'll be either driving (expensive and to be avoided) or spending extra time on public transit, or risking a catastrophic healthcare expense by biking there (in America anyway), or just eating the regular ol' cheap food. Also, do not take on any dependents. Like I said, it can be done.
- nradov 4y ago
  Healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs are widely available and cheap unless you're in a complete food desert.
  - rdiddly 4y ago
    Trivia note - "an apple and an egg" is a German expression to mean a cheap price, kind of like when we say something costs "peanuts."
TeaDrunk 4y ago
Renting a room comes with its own logistical nightmares, fwiw. Navigating the entire roomate interview process sucks. More than once I've had friends who deal with roomates have months at a time too stressed to advance their other career goals because roomates stealing their shit, playing loud music, refusing to leave, not paying on time, etc etc. When you don't have "fuck you" money, there is surprisingly little necessary to royally fuck up your plans to get out of the bad situation you're in.
Beltalowda 4y ago
I don't know anything about Boston, but where I live in Europe that's not so easy; a lot of properties within commuting distance aren't cheap, either. Sometimes they're even more expensive actually. And living two hours from your workplace isn't cheap either: you pay either public transport costs or fuel for your car, never mind the enormous amount of time you'll spend commuting. Consider a place like London. It's bloody huge, and much of it is quite expensive. At the end of the day, London is going to need people staffing grocery stores, and cleaners, and that kind of thing. Not the entire population can be software devs or whatnot working from home, and you can't push them all outside of London.
screye 4y ago
Boston is actually an amazing example of things the US needs to do to enable affordable living. The expansive public transport network allows you to live far from the city without incurring huge commute times. That paired with the density means that car ownership is discouraged, which takes away another expense. Lastly, the city continues building multi-family middle housing in the city outskirts which keeps housing availability high. High density and walking/public space culture comes with many other advantages. High footraffic means restaurants can run low-margin, high-volume food that poor can afford. The public spaces mean that restaurants can operate low-overhead businesses out of food trucks and holes in the wall. Speaking if public spaces, they've generally (idk how, it is more localized there) managed to avoid the violent homelessness problem of the other major cities. Violent homelessness disproportionally affects poor people as they are more reliant on public spaces and safety in numbers. This has helped the city avoid an SF/Portland/Seattle-esque deterioration of entire neighborhoods. Most American cities don't have any of these pros, which leads to skyrocketing costs associated with city living.
- yuppie_scum 4y ago
  Boston and eastern MA are far from affordable. Homeownership in a decent area inside 128 is unattainable without a pretty sizable nest eg (equity or gift from parents). The public transit system is insufficient. The Commuter Rail is infrequent, slow and often unreliable. The entire system needs to be electrified for RER service but that’s probably twenty years away if we are lucky. And the homeless have just been concentrated into one shantytown at Mass and Cass.
  - screye 4y ago
    All good points. My praise for Boston was in comparison to absolutely shambolically run cities in the rest of the US. In comparison to some well-run global cities, (Greater) Boston still has ways to go. > Mass and Cass Yep, Methadone Mile is the uncomfortable compromise between liberal: "don't evict the homeless" versus the moderate: "keep our neighborhoods safe" agendas. It keeps the rest of Boston relatively aggressive-homeless free, but the addicts and local residents are worse off. > entire system needs to be electrified At times, it is jarring to see the US do worse than 3rd world countries. The mind-boggling cost of any infrastructure in the US is really holding the country back.
gsich 4y ago
And have commune add 10 hours of unpaid labor.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rtlfe 4y ago

> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world? If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much everybody could afford an apartment.

powerslacker 4y ago
They aren't neccesarily designed that way, it is the reality of democratic local governance that real property owners in a community are naturally going to vote for measures that maximize the value of their property so that they can sell it once the land has a more profitable use than their own. When everyone votes for their own economic interest it tends to make real property more expensive over time.
- rtlfe 4y ago
  You're just nitpicking vocabulary. This is exactly what I meant, and I would consider the laws and regulations that result from this process the "design" of a city.

iamdbtoo 4y ago

Yeah, that's kind of how this country markets itself. Being able to afford a home and a family on a regular worker's pay is literally part of "The American Dream."

aerosmile 4y ago
The American Dream is not about getting more for less, as in "most luxury for the least amount of effort." It's about having a shot at owning a business without the financial backing of a rich family [0], which is more like "most luxury for an insane amount of effort." [0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  > literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pempem 4y ago
    @Aerosmile I dont know that you need to look at Austria. You can just look at America over time. Mobility is getting harder and there's no real need to pretend it isn't
- tcptomato 4y ago
  This is r/shitamericanssay material.
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  The US is not a capitalist paradise. We moved a software company from the UK to a US Delaware Corp 2 years ago and it was a major headache involving substantial legal fees, accounting, employee benefits, and taxes. Texas interestingly has been the hardest to deal with--probably our biggest single accounting expense due to what seems to be antiquated tax management on their end. It was a lot easier doing business in the UK. We had relatively low accounting overhead, the laws were not hard to follow, and we didn't have to deal with having employees and customers sprinkled over a dozen state jurisdictions. We're fortunate to work in a growing and lucrative market, but it's not all peaches and cream.
mepiethree 4y ago
A home, yeah, not a home in downtown metros. My uncle is a teacher and owns two houses in rural Ohio with his wife, kid, and two dogs. Living the American dream.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  How many hours did he work to buy the house. How many will a new teacher have to work.
- refurb 4y ago
  Pretty much. Not realistic to assume someone comes to the US with nothing and then buy a home in say San Francisco. The American Dream is typically "come to the US with nothing and build a comfortable life, no matter who you are". I still think that's possible. Guaranteed? Of course not.
  - nradov 4y ago
    A high percentage of homes in San Francisco are literally owned by first-generation immigrants. You can obviously see this just walking around and talking to people.
- iamdbtoo 4y ago
  Why not downtown metros? Would you prefer to have a poorer group of people who can't live near where they work?
pempem 4y ago
I've thought a lot about this, esp as someone who was born here and whose parents immigrated here for the American Dream. They've done great. We lived in a rural area. It was possible because one of them came highly skilled and solicited to immigrate. That being said I shudder when I hear "just move to rural blah blah blah". My life was horrible there. I was considered black, egytian, non-english speaking, to come from a family of savages or royalty or witchcraft depending on the speaker. This whole "move to a rural place" really doesn't seem open to the non-white growing majority. Its certainly nothing like the Californian life I live now where I still cannot afford a home but can enjoy Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, Korean, and american culture in a form of acceptance that was fully closed to me growing up.
- gurumeditations 4y ago
  Same with gays especially, you have to live in a city or live in hiding in most places.
  - pempem 4y ago
    Fully agreed ^
- bigthymer 4y ago
  Care to expound some more on the differences between living in rural places vs. the Californian life? I've spent most of my time in the suburbs of coastal cities.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
That's a very different version of the American Dream than what I've always considered it to be. Even as portrayed in movies through rose tinted glasses it's always seemed to be the conjecture that even if you start with nothing, through a lot of hard work, thrift, frugality and determination you can work your way up through the ranks and eventually achieve a good living. They generally make a big deal out of the protagonist living a hard scrabble life while they're working towards their big break. Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
lazide 4y ago
Uh no. The American Dream has been about the ability to work hard to better oneself, and work UP TO that after education or doing something unique (like making their own business work and be profitable). Not that anyone could move here and just get it everything by doing the minimum.
- pempem 4y ago
  What is the 'minimum' when every single corporation is working to de-skill jobs so that they can cut wages, limit onboarding etc. We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.
  - lazide 4y ago
    It's literally always been that way. Every business tries to cut costs, or they become unprofitable. Every organization tries to mechanize/create repetitive process where they can to minimize the amount of skilled workers they need as part of it. Every organization tries to skrimp where it can. I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies. Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation. Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see. And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.
spacemanmatt 4y ago
I don't know when that idea got started, but it seems like my grandparents' generation (The Greatest Generation) enjoyed the greatest benefits of it, then my parents' generation benefited but also inherited their parents' wealth. As a GenX person, I watched my cohort struggle well more than their boomer parents' cohort. The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.
thedailymail 4y ago
Completely anecdotal, but my maternal grandfather was a first-generation immigrant at the turn of the 20th century, speaking no English, no family, no job - the whole cliché. He did various jobs - fireman, train conductor, court stenographer - none of which would be particularly high-income or high-prestige today. But by the 1960s he had managed to raise 12 children with my grandmother, a stay-at-home mother, and to pay off both a 10-room home in the suburbs of NYC and an 80-acre vacation place in the Catskills. The heroic labor of immigrants notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that would be possible for a fresh-off-the-boater today. I told my 20-something kids about it and they just laughed, like hearing about someone who stumbled across a pot of gold or a magic goose in a fairytale. I can't say I blame them.

pc86 4y ago

> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world? Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning subreddit that even starts approaching discussions of renting, or landlords, or landlord-tenant relations, and you'll get flooded with comments so detached from reality it will stun you.

Spivak 4y ago
If you can’t afford to live in the city where you work then it’s pretty much the definition of “not a living wage.” Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  How? If you can travel back and forth and that makes it work, what is the problem? You can hate it, sure, but, at least where I live, people commute 3+ hours/day to make a nice living while living cheap. What is wrong with that?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The increase in the world’s entropy is not priced into the commuting costs, so it is artificially cheap living. Assuming an inhabitable planet with clean air and water is a goal, then commuting 3 hours would not be cheap.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      You are right, but you can stimulate wfh and stimulate companies to spread out more. The fact a lot of people are against that (including here on HN) shows that it's all great, but not in my backyard.
- nameisname 4y ago
  It's not the wage that needs to change it would be the prices of housing in the city. This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body. It's called gentrification. It's currently happening to me. I could not afford to buy my house now and I just bought it a few years ago. Of course there still needs to be staff in the area working retail etc. but I haven't seen anyone over 25 in a store near me for over a year.

bruce343434 4y ago

Logical fallacy detected: false dichotomy

Spivak 4y ago

If your job is in that city then yeah kinda. Workers today are so entitled, demanding an entire studio apartment the audacity.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cloverich 4y ago
It’s been a while for me but i always remember single person apartments (even studios) being relatively more expensive than multi bedroom with roommates. Anytime I wanted to save money that was always the first place i started. In that sense i personally would consider an apartment all to yourself a relative luxury.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Sorry, I’m biased because I’ve literally never lived alone. Didn’t even cross my mind that one person’s salary can afford an apartment. When I say an entire studio apartment to yourself an entire studio apartment for you and your roommate or partner.
- standardUser 4y ago
  If it has been a while for you, then perhaps you were much younger and comfortable sharing a living space with relative strangers. Many people working these crappy jobs are not kids in their teens and twenties. They are middle-aged and these are their careers. Also, the workers we are talking about don't "want to save money", they are perpetually spending every cent they earn to cover costs and debt. It isn't some pit stop on the way to the upper-middle class (though upper-middle class people seem to like to pretend it is).

rdiddly 4y ago

I mostly agree, although are Amazon warehouses in the most expensive cities? My understanding was that they were big and therefore located in spread-out suburban food-deserts poorly served by public transit, where land is cheap and available, and the zoning is lax if you're building an Amazon warehouse and "bringing jobs" but strangely prohibitive if you're thinking of building apartments. Anyway just penciling out the math, a $15/hr wage ($31K/yr) puts you in the 12% federal tax bracket and the 4% California (for example) state tax bracket. So your take-home would be $15/hr x 2080 hrs/yr x (1 - 0.12 - 0.04) = $26.2K/yr. So at that point rent ($1K/mo = $12K/year) is a good 45% of your take-home pay, and you've got $14.2K left to pay food, utilities, transportation, and (hopefully not) healthcare. It can be done. Each thing tends to trade off with other things. For example, to avoid healthcare expenses you'll want to stay healthy, eating healthy food for example. But healthy food is expensive, and probably not located close by your shitty part of town, so you'll be either driving (expensive and to be avoided) or spending extra time on public transit, or risking a catastrophic healthcare expense by biking there (in America anyway), or just eating the regular ol' cheap food. Also, do not take on any dependents. Like I said, it can be done.

nradov 4y ago
Healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs are widely available and cheap unless you're in a complete food desert.
- rdiddly 4y ago
  Trivia note - "an apple and an egg" is a German expression to mean a cheap price, kind of like when we say something costs "peanuts."

TeaDrunk 4y ago

Renting a room comes with its own logistical nightmares, fwiw. Navigating the entire roomate interview process sucks. More than once I've had friends who deal with roomates have months at a time too stressed to advance their other career goals because roomates stealing their shit, playing loud music, refusing to leave, not paying on time, etc etc. When you don't have "fuck you" money, there is surprisingly little necessary to royally fuck up your plans to get out of the bad situation you're in.

Beltalowda 4y ago

I don't know anything about Boston, but where I live in Europe that's not so easy; a lot of properties within commuting distance aren't cheap, either. Sometimes they're even more expensive actually. And living two hours from your workplace isn't cheap either: you pay either public transport costs or fuel for your car, never mind the enormous amount of time you'll spend commuting. Consider a place like London. It's bloody huge, and much of it is quite expensive. At the end of the day, London is going to need people staffing grocery stores, and cleaners, and that kind of thing. Not the entire population can be software devs or whatnot working from home, and you can't push them all outside of London.

screye 4y ago

Boston is actually an amazing example of things the US needs to do to enable affordable living. The expansive public transport network allows you to live far from the city without incurring huge commute times. That paired with the density means that car ownership is discouraged, which takes away another expense. Lastly, the city continues building multi-family middle housing in the city outskirts which keeps housing availability high. High density and walking/public space culture comes with many other advantages. High footraffic means restaurants can run low-margin, high-volume food that poor can afford. The public spaces mean that restaurants can operate low-overhead businesses out of food trucks and holes in the wall. Speaking if public spaces, they've generally (idk how, it is more localized there) managed to avoid the violent homelessness problem of the other major cities. Violent homelessness disproportionally affects poor people as they are more reliant on public spaces and safety in numbers. This has helped the city avoid an SF/Portland/Seattle-esque deterioration of entire neighborhoods. Most American cities don't have any of these pros, which leads to skyrocketing costs associated with city living.

yuppie_scum 4y ago
Boston and eastern MA are far from affordable. Homeownership in a decent area inside 128 is unattainable without a pretty sizable nest eg (equity or gift from parents). The public transit system is insufficient. The Commuter Rail is infrequent, slow and often unreliable. The entire system needs to be electrified for RER service but that’s probably twenty years away if we are lucky. And the homeless have just been concentrated into one shantytown at Mass and Cass.
- screye 4y ago
  All good points. My praise for Boston was in comparison to absolutely shambolically run cities in the rest of the US. In comparison to some well-run global cities, (Greater) Boston still has ways to go. > Mass and Cass Yep, Methadone Mile is the uncomfortable compromise between liberal: "don't evict the homeless" versus the moderate: "keep our neighborhoods safe" agendas. It keeps the rest of Boston relatively aggressive-homeless free, but the addicts and local residents are worse off. > entire system needs to be electrified At times, it is jarring to see the US do worse than 3rd world countries. The mind-boggling cost of any infrastructure in the US is really holding the country back.

gsich 4y ago

And have commune add 10 hours of unpaid labor.

deleted 4y ago

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