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 suburba

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.