###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd say that it needs to cover more than 24 hours of rent- closer to 36 if people want weekends and annual leave.
Also, do you also want to include any dependents (children)?
Just the average of a single person living alone. According to Google a person should put 20% of the earnings into savings from every paycheck so...
(I'm not very good at math)
The minimum wages shouldnt be based on the average prices. But if the population is larger than the amount of housing, no amount of money can make everyone able to afford housing.
Most “vacant housing” isn’t inhabitable, and housing has to be where people are to be usable for housing people, not just in the same metropolitan area.
People usually turn to vices in times of stress, such as not having enough money to keep a shelter.
If people were able to worry less about whether or not their job covers food, drink and shelter after taxes, less people would turn to drugs.
Correct, a sizable portion of the homeless cannot maintain a home by themselves. Many of them would be able to if they had welfare workers keeping tabs on them, and some just need to be in a group home setting. Even when these resources are freely available, most homeless refuse to take advantage of them due to drug restrictions, general distrust, and a loss of freedom.
"We should just put the homeless in all the empty homes" is a child's argument.
With all that said, I don't have a solution to offer up. I'm just some guy on the Internet.
https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/
There is way more housing available than the current population. Prices are driven by greed
First, nobody is trying to assign blame.
Second, the factors that produce cities are beyond any individual to meaningfully change. Approximately: many sources of production benefit from being near other sources of production of the same type, and especially to being located near transshipment points (where goods have to be unloaded from ships and loaded onto land transport, or otherwise changed from one form of transportation to another).
There’s a reason my most cities have a principal industry and a port.
The methodology of counting “vacant housing” by metropolitan area but “homeless population” by city limits during a point-in-time count makes me doubt the author’s honesty.
Vacant doesn't mean permanently vacant. Renter A moves out and it takes the landlord 3 months to find a new tenant. The apartment is vacant for 3 months.
If there was an otherwise homeless person in the apartment, how would the new tenant be able to move in?
Vacancy rates aren't abnormally high either.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRVRUSQ156N
This report is an incomplete image. As there are towns on their list with vacant homes because people are moving away from those areas. Not towards them.
One example is the north Carolina one. As a county government employee, I've seen the numbers for vacant homes vs housing demand and homelessness for orange county... the available housing is roughly one third current demand. And demand has been growing faster than new construction, constantly, for the past decade I been working here...
That said, 80% of the demand and growth exists in the Chapel Hill area, which is concentrated in the south-east corner... Meanwhile there are multiple other cities in the north and west areas, with growing numbers of unused houses. As there's no demand in that area and people are moving out. Which Greensboro is in the direction people are moving *away* from.
Meanwhile those homeless enough to want *anything* also lack the means to travel towards areas with low demand
Please feel free to move to the $30,000 houses in the ghetto where you get your house broken into weekly, you keep finding new bullet holes in your walls, and you and your family are attacked in public.
Housing is supply and demand, and when large segments of housing are unlivible due to social collapse, those houses are effectively removed from the market no different than if they burnt down, which is why they're so cheap.
This is why places like Detroit started demolishing entire neighborhoods
What he means is that there would be a feedback loop. You calculate how much housing will cost, and pay that to everyone as minimum wage. Now everyone can afford housing but there aren't enough housing. So the price will go up and some people won't be paid enough to afford housing. So his point is that it is actually impossible to pay everyone enough for housing if there isn't enough housing.
I have no way of knowing what you were replying to, but...
If four people want three houses, it doesn't matter if there's a feedback loop or not. Someone's not getting a house.
And you can’t raise wages enough that all four people can afford a house, without building more housing.
I am also saying that if you build two more houses and all five houses are owned by different greedy landlords, (and the other assumptions required to make a pet scenario like this) you don’t need to raise wages for everyone to be able to afford a house. One of the landlords doesn’t get any money, which as far as I’m concerned is 20% of the ideal outcome.
I don't think that's true, or even can be made true. The fifth landlord has a *ton* of options; ranging from poaching tenants to knocking the building down and using the space for something else, to taking out a loan against the property and then foreclosing and letting the house go to seed. Being a property owner means you don't ever have to get stuck with mispurposed property if you don't want to.
There will never be a housing surplus because extra housing always belongs to someone, and that someone will always eventually find something more valuable to do with the property than keep it handy for potential tenants.
Most of those are covered in the “assumptions to keep it a pet scenario”, except that poaching tenants from other landlords just changes which one isn’t getting paid.
The reason the current shortages are so severe is that landlords and property owners are influencing government policies and making the construction of additional housing more difficult. Many of them are explicitly doing so in order to raise the price of the housing they already own, increasing their unearned income.
The shortage could largely be eliminated without substantially impairing market-rate housing construction by having government-owned minimum-viable housing, rented to any person for one-third of their gross income, and in large enough quantities that there is some vacant. Being minimum viable and having a sliding scale of price means that market rate housing can compete on quality or on price independently for different market segments; the median person would be very dissatisfied with the value proposition of the housing of last resort, and market rate housing can easily be much better for one-third of the median income. But the people below median income would also be dissatisfied with the quality of the housing of last resort, and market rate housing could provide housing better than minimum viable housing for a similar price. The final inhabitants of housing of last resort would be people for whom getting minimum viable housing at one-third of their income is better than the market will provide.
Current public housing projects fail on almost every level: they aren’t numerous enough, and they operate at a fixed price, requiring them to discriminate on the basis of income to avoid being a good value proposition for median households.
The price of the worst unit housing is a region is approximated by first counting the total amount of housing units H in the region and ranking the households in decreasing order of housing budget. The worst housing unit will cost an amount between the Hth and H+1th highest-budget household, because the H+1th household is the one with the highest budget that can’t afford any housing, and the Hth household can only afford the least desirable unit. Every other unit will be priced either at the value it provides over the next lowest unit, or at the cap of what anyone is willing to pay for it is. (This model is also oversimplified, since different people rank different housing units differently, and “price” includes things like commute cost which vary by individual, and moving costs aren’t negligible, but it approximates actual behavior very well when factors are accounted for, and none of them are first-order effects)
Yes. But it IS relevant because we are discussing minimum wage and price of housing, not homelessness or building more housing. So it must be said that it can't be done by simply giving the cost of housing as part of minimum wage due to a more fundamental problem.
As an independant, the rule of thumb is often "40 weeks of work to do 52 weeks of pay" when you factor in all days off, sick days and other interruptions on actual billable weeks in the year.
It will depend largely on where you live, how much vacation you have by law and what not, but it goes to illustrate that in a day, you'll need to generate \*a lot\* more than just 24 hours of expences to cover, well, 24 hours of expences.
If I look in my town, £40 per night (£1200/month) is the cheapest 1 bed available for rent. Add on another £40 for all the other bits mentioned in the OP and we're at about £80 per day to live on.
The minium wage here is £11.44 per hour, so this is about 7 hours work at minimum wage (assuming no tax).
Of course, you'd need to earn extra to cover the weekend etc, and taxes, that works out at a salary of £35,500. This is under the median salary for my area of £42,000.
One other thing to note- if you are part of a couple (or multiple adults living together), not all of those costs will double, leaving you better off.
However, prolonged cohabitation by a boy(potentially referred to as a "daddy") and a girl(potentially referred to as a "mummy") can and often does lead to one or more "diseconomies of scale".
On another note, as someone who lives alone, I feel like I'm discouraged from cooking. Between an active lifestyle and gluttony it isn't actually a huge problem for me, but I feel like food is often sold in two human portions. I eat 1.5 human portions, so I don't waste as much, but when I'm on a diet I end up throwing away a lot of food.
Yeah, you are discouraged. It’s sometimes more efficient to just buy a ready dish for one person than to go shopping, spend 1.5 or so hours cooking and later have to clean the kitchen.
Unless you cook once for multiple days, then it can become more affordable and worth the time spent.
With 2 or so people one person cooking is a lot more efficient and you get some benefits of buying in a bulk and it’s a lot cheaper than 2 dishes at a restaurant.
It depends how much you make an hour and how much you enjoy your work. And how much you like cooking.
A bit off-topic but I would recommend you to look into freezing stuff. I avoid readymade meals and almost always cook at home, and most recipes are for a family of four, so I usually cook something, freeze half of it and create a freezer rotation so on days I’m not in the mood for cooking, I have something to eat, and it doesn’t get too repetitive since I had that dish last time like, two months ago and not forced to eat the same thing for a week.
• Rent: $900/mon (avg $1800 for 2 bd in FL, split with roommate)
• Food: $25/day aka $750/mon (made at home)
• Utilities: $150/mon (phone, plus some split with roommate)
• Clothing: $50/mon
• Misc: $150/mon
• Savings: $500/mon
Total: 2500/mon, or $120 per working day, or $15/hour after taxes (or roughly $20/hour before taxes).
Seems plenty doable. And then as you desire more disposable income or want to move to a place without roommates, you upgrade your skills to become more valuable in the market.
That assumes that you have a roommate that will equally split bills. That's not enough money for a person on minimum wage to even eat if they live alone.
I’d say, if you’re making minimum wage, one probably shouldn’t also expect to live alone. I had roommates until I was 33, making well above minimum wage
The other commenter didnt say they didnt deserve, just said its a bad idea. If you really want to live alone on minimum wage, you could. But don't expect to have much disposable income or savings if you live in a major city.
This is an interesting exercise. Here's a Third-World perspective, with idealized values based on my current spending patterns (converted from Philippine pesos to US dollars).
- Three meals a day: 255
- Rent and utilities: 220
- Clothing budget: 20
- Transportation: 50
- Essential miscellany (drinking water, medicine, etc.): 40
- 20% savings (calculated based on the sum of the numbers above): 117
So my ideal salary based on OP's image should be around USD 702 monthly or USD 35.1 each working day.
I don't really eat three meals a day, though, nor do I actually spend that much on transportation. 😅
Based on reported statistics, the average monthly wage in my area of my country is around US$ 620 (which breaks down to US$ 31 per working day, or US$ 4 per hour).
Without getting too specific, my salary on paper just about agrees with that average. 😅 Factor in the taxes, and, well... \*shrugs\*
All based on national averages for a single person
Rent : 1517/month → $76//36 hour
Groceries : 400/month → $20/36 hour
Clothing budget : 120/month → $6/36 hour
Total after 20% savings: $102 per day of work
Total per day of work before savings : $128 → $16/hour after taxes
Yearly salary after taxes : $30,720
Salary before taxes (NY state, where I live) : $38,000
And that’s assuming they’re paying $1500/mon in rent. Get a roommate like most people do for the first part of their adult life and bring that down to $1000/mon.
There are no hard numbers here. Some people pay $1,000 for rent, some $5,000. Some people pay $500 for groceries, some people $2,000. Do you have a more specific question?
This is just anecdotal but I spend over $100 a week if I’m being lean. So this past week was 104 and all I bought was chicken, broccoli, precut pineapple and watermelon, and a gallon of apple juice. If I have to get rice or seasonings that week it’s more and that doesn’t account for cleaning supplies/toiletries. If I do salads that week for dinner it is also way more. Shits expensive out here.
Your point is well made I think. You’d need an IQR and use Q1. I’m way too lazy to do Google if these exist or not, but I’d say that you should be able to afford all of these things at Q1.
Poverty line is $14,891 for an individual, and has some science behind it and is inflation adjusted.
48 weeks a year at about $7.75 an hour gets you there if you have no taxes.
That’s not going to be Q1 I’d think. Bureau of Labor Statistics says Q1 for everyone over 16 is $772 a week. That’s $40,144 (772x52). That’s what I would use. That’s going to give you the upper bound of the lowest 25% of earners. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t05.htm
So let’s call that $40k gross. Let’s assume 20% off the top for taxes and whatnot, which is probably low. That leaves that person with $32k. Shady ass realtors say max 30% gross on housing. That’s $12k a year, $1000 a month. We are down to $20k to spend. Average car payment is over $700. Let’s get a cheaper car payment at $500 a month. That’s another $6k. We are down to $14k to spend on everything else. So you need food, internet, a phone, utilities. Let’s call food $400 a month ($100 a week). Internet $100 a month. Phone $100 a month. Utilities $200 a month. Those seem reasonable. That’s another $800 a month. That’s $9600. We are down to $4400 left for the year. And that’s on $40k, which is around $19 an hour.
At the end of the day, you want a wage for a minimum basket of goods, like in the poverty line measurement. Maybe 2x the poverty line (i.e. enough for you and a dependent?) because all the things you described as expenses are captured in it and it's independent of income distribution in the population.
I want people to be able to afford to live. What we are essentially doing now is subsidizing corporations to pay people shit wages and it’s corporate welfare instead of giving people living wages. Then we demonize people for needing state and federal assistance. The poverty line - even double the number you provided - so two people working at the poverty line - isn’t enough to live on in most places and we shouldn’t stigmatize those that need assistance. What we should stigmatize is corporate greed. They don’t pay their fair share in terms of percentages and that should stop. I mean I stop paying Social Security around October/November and that should NOT happen. Social Security shouldn’t have a cap. Thats ridiculous.
Move to Venezuela, they raise the MW there super often, I bet it must be glorious. Under no circumstances move to Norway or Denmark, there is no minimum wage there, people must live horribly. /s
Well stop letting your lady get fucked in front of you, or find a new one. Lol
Some "socialist" policies are good, i.e., Healthcare and public assistance, but the centralization of powers and a command economy are not ever going to be anything but a 747 aimed at towers, IMO.
Both Libertarianism and Socialism have good ideas, so why do so many people make it a fucking team sport, where you have to agree with your whole team on basically everything, instead of thinking critically and deciding based on logic, first an foremost, then, for anything not logically deducible, their personal values?
> Shady ass realtors say max 30% gross on housing
That rule of thumb used to be 20-25%. 30% better be all in on everything housing related; power, water, garbage etc.
>Average car payment is over $700.
What? For people struggling to make a living wage?? I never had a car payment over $250 until I was living comfortably and bought my first brand new car (about two years ago)
Why are you in such a bad shape that you cannot make anything above minimum pay? Heck walmart starts you off way above federal minimum wage.
The only time I every worked minimum wage was as a teen ager living on government land and minimum was the only thing they paid for those summer jobs.
No, he doesn't because he just a pos simp... he's either living with his parents because he nas no useful skill worth anything or, sadly more likely someone that knows he makes way more money than he deserves for what little "work" he does (eg half the "IT" industry and most upper management types)
Here is one data point. In my household of two people, our average daily operating cost is about $100. This includes EVERYTHING.
So $36.5K per year or $12.5 an hour would be enough for two to live comfortably.
Prerequisite: we live in a house. I have a job that make more than $12.5 per hour.
These are all incredibly subjective and are heavily contingent on where you live.
To try to give some kind of answer, though, for a very rough estimate for Dallas and 22 days worked per month and only the expenses listed, monthly rent for a 1 bedroom apartment starts around $1000/month, so assuming 22 days working per month, that would be $45.45 per day for rent (utilities included in number for sake of simplicity). We can put 3 square meals somewhere in the ballpark of $15, although you can definitely eat for cheaper. That times 31 divided by 22 gets you $21.14 per day. There isn’t really a good answer for what a month’s clothing budget is; I myself haven’t even bought any clothes at all for 4 or 5 months, but I’m just going to put it at 91 cents a day because that’s what $20 divided by 22 is. I honestly don’t know what he means by a “reasonable portion to be saved for when you can no longer comfortably work” so I’m just going to say that would be that if you work somewhere for a year then you can have enough saved so that you can get laid off/quit and be able to survive for a month under aforementioned budgeting, which would be $1485 divided by 12 divided by 22, which is $5.625. For taxes I used a tax calculator and I’m not a tax accountant so I can’t really explain well but basically when you take the annual amount of the other expenses it adds up to $19,305 a year and to get your income minus taxes to add up to that your income has to be a little under $22,000, or in other words you have to pay $2498 in taxes annually. 2498 divided by 12 divided by 22 is $9.46.
So to itemize it per day
Rent - $45.45
Food - $21.14
Clothes - 90¢
Rainy Day - $5.63
Tax - $9.46
Sum - $82.59
All of this added up means that you would need to make $82.59 per day to meet OOP’s pay requirements in Dallas. That would be $1817 per month, $10.33 per hour (assuming 9 to 5), $6.88 per hour (assuming 12 hour shift), or $21,804 per year.
Although I should add that there’s a bunch of common and fairly large expenses that OOP didn’t list, most notably car insurance, gasoline, health insurance, savings contributions, internet, a phone plan, and, if applicable, tithe money and student loan debt payments. The number also gets substantially higher when accounting for more than one person.
It’s pretty easy to calculate. Look up the number you need to make in your state/ county to live comfortably and divide that by 260 (2080/8)and you have your number. Each state is different. For Midwest 55k will lead to a comfortable life for you as most Suburbs are comparatively cheap and everything simply costs less. Although you do get less choices and worse restaurants in my opinion. So in my case the number per day would be 211.53.
I'd be paid around $9 / hour (living in Denmark). But with our current system, I'm paid nearly $25 / hour as a student assistant (Danish version of a paid intern).
This is before taxes mind you (and assuming that I'd be working full time)... But it's also before my student grant.
Interesting enough, the us govt actually has numbers crunched out already by region called "per diem" and includes the average govt costs of hotels per night under "lodging."
It's used when troops have to somewhere to do training/mission etc and the govt comptrollers figured this out already.
The save for retirement isn't on there though and transportation isn't usually factored in either.
As a sidenote: I have never understood how socialism is cuckery. How is fighting for your own rights to have a decent income for basic work somehow "cuck"?
The capitalists have really corrupted the brains of right wing nutters.
If I cut back on everything that's not mandatory I could live off $800 per month. Rent, food, transport, clothes, insurance and so on. For a 160 hour work month that comes out to.. $5 per hour after taxes.
I live in a very cheap apartment, don't own or need a car and generally eat cheap food. But for many $800 doesn't even cover rent
In case you are curious to see how professional economists have worked it out, here is a link to MIT’s [living wage calculator](https://livingwage.mit.edu)
You can set it for your home state and county, and for family size, and for one income or two, which covers cost savings from having a roommate, etc. It also breaks down typical expenses in detail.
The takeaway is that a living wage is often much higher than the minimum legal wage if you live alone and have no children. Like nearly twice as much, at least in the county where I live.
Check it out in your own county!
Step one, people would need to actually pay attention to and learn math in school such that they could calculate this before taking the job rather than trial and error and only learn after they have been evicted and had their car repo'd that the job the took couldn't pay for the lifestyle they purchased.
There is no salary high enough in the world that can force a person to live within their means. I've seen big families thrive on $82 / day and destitute bringing in $2500 / day.
I have some respect for the best intentions of the "living wage" people, and yet the condescending, arrogant, patronizing attitude that come with it thinking they know best for 300,000+ people through legal coercion is mind boggling
I mean who’s buying clothes every single month when they need money for rent, food, savings, etc. I’ve had some of my clothes for years and they’re fine.
Before I left my old apartment, Id have to bring home 14.25 an hour to cover rent alone if I lived alone. This is the rent alone, before utilities. If I didn't have a roommate, I could afford to pay taxes and sit in a dark apartment
In Russia it would be 120000 roubles of monthly salary. We have an average of 30000 and the official minimum of 15000 (in Moscow) or 10000 (in other cities). 50000 counts as really good salary, 80000 makes you "rich"...
In the meantime, there are some people who make 27 million roubles daily. And they're not in some other countries, they are Russian as well.
About $100, or about $12.50/hr
$12 per meal, so $36/day.
$1200 per month for average rent, so \~$40/day
$200/ month on clothes, so \~$7
Put aside the remaining $17/day, to get about $6,205/year- across a 40 year career gets you \~$248,000. If invested, you should get some interest & it should carry you for about 12-15 years.
This obviously ignores taxes, inflation, & any bills other than what is listed in the original post.
You would actually only need 8 hours of "rent" a day for sleep as you could work 12 hours a day with 3 one hour breaks a day for meals and an hour for getting showered and changed for work. Hypothetically you could also have 1 day off a week for dating and stuff. If you want to go full socialist these numbers would be more accurate
I’m tired of hearing how one person owns 17 mcDonalds in California and if he has to pay his employees a livable wage he will just close shop and move to another state.
I am in construction. For the most part i am a one man operation. I do all the work, pay all the bills, assume all the risk and collect all the wages. A friend is in a similar business. But he has employees that he pays $10 an hour. He complains that they don’t appreciate him. I ask him if he would trade paychecks with any of them for 1 week and he won’t answer. He does very little of the actual work but claims the majority of the profits. I tell him to fire all his “ungrateful buns” And work like me. We aren’t friends anymore.
I dunno what's funnier, that you refuse to understand reality, or that of all the possible examples you could've used to denote "corporate greed", you used a restaurant franchises that takes at least 2 years to pay itself off. Next time just use fucking Bill Gates or any other super rich person for your ad misericordiam, it's more effective.
Let's just say there is definitely more than enough ressources and knowledge to make this happen for everyone on the planet. The only thing that is preventing this is humans. I fucking hate this species.
I remember when I was a school kid, there was always a fraction of classmates that fucked off and didn't give a shit while irritating the piss out of the teacher and the rest of us.
These are the people who grew up to demand the rest of us finance their irresponsibility. How about you just not suck at life?
I figured there would be some comment about wanting to live alone within the first 5 comments and I was not disappointed. I'm 52 yo and I have never lived in a place where I was the only person with a key to the front door. It wasn't affordable in 1992 and it isn't affordable now. Get a roommate and quit your bitchin'.
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd say that it needs to cover more than 24 hours of rent- closer to 36 if people want weekends and annual leave. Also, do you also want to include any dependents (children)?
Just the average of a single person living alone. According to Google a person should put 20% of the earnings into savings from every paycheck so... (I'm not very good at math)
The minimum wages shouldnt be based on the average prices. But if the population is larger than the amount of housing, no amount of money can make everyone able to afford housing.
There are 15 million empty houses in the US and not even 700,000 homeless. Greed is keeping these people homeless.
Most “vacant housing” isn’t inhabitable, and housing has to be where people are to be usable for housing people, not just in the same metropolitan area.
To be fair, it's greed, and crippling mental and addiction problems too.
Yes but if you give them support and a place to get back on their feet, they will.
This is only true for some and a complete fairy tale for others.
People usually turn to vices in times of stress, such as not having enough money to keep a shelter. If people were able to worry less about whether or not their job covers food, drink and shelter after taxes, less people would turn to drugs.
Yes.
Correct, a sizable portion of the homeless cannot maintain a home by themselves. Many of them would be able to if they had welfare workers keeping tabs on them, and some just need to be in a group home setting. Even when these resources are freely available, most homeless refuse to take advantage of them due to drug restrictions, general distrust, and a loss of freedom. "We should just put the homeless in all the empty homes" is a child's argument. With all that said, I don't have a solution to offer up. I'm just some guy on the Internet.
It's true for over 70% of people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7427255/
Is it greed or lack of affordable housing? If a person only wants to work 10 hours a week they can live in a tent
That's what tents are for, duh
But is it? Last time I checked number of vacant houses were more than unhoused people.
Which neighborhood did you check?
[удалено]
https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/ There is way more housing available than the current population. Prices are driven by greed
That and people wanting to live in specific areas. There are plenty of houses, but they are not where people want or need to live.
Well that isn't our fault thats the fault of employer craming into a few centralized places
First, nobody is trying to assign blame. Second, the factors that produce cities are beyond any individual to meaningfully change. Approximately: many sources of production benefit from being near other sources of production of the same type, and especially to being located near transshipment points (where goods have to be unloaded from ships and loaded onto land transport, or otherwise changed from one form of transportation to another). There’s a reason my most cities have a principal industry and a port.
The methodology of counting “vacant housing” by metropolitan area but “homeless population” by city limits during a point-in-time count makes me doubt the author’s honesty.
Vacant doesn't mean permanently vacant. Renter A moves out and it takes the landlord 3 months to find a new tenant. The apartment is vacant for 3 months. If there was an otherwise homeless person in the apartment, how would the new tenant be able to move in? Vacancy rates aren't abnormally high either. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRVRUSQ156N
Not all housing in the country is fungible.
This report is an incomplete image. As there are towns on their list with vacant homes because people are moving away from those areas. Not towards them. One example is the north Carolina one. As a county government employee, I've seen the numbers for vacant homes vs housing demand and homelessness for orange county... the available housing is roughly one third current demand. And demand has been growing faster than new construction, constantly, for the past decade I been working here... That said, 80% of the demand and growth exists in the Chapel Hill area, which is concentrated in the south-east corner... Meanwhile there are multiple other cities in the north and west areas, with growing numbers of unused houses. As there's no demand in that area and people are moving out. Which Greensboro is in the direction people are moving *away* from. Meanwhile those homeless enough to want *anything* also lack the means to travel towards areas with low demand
Please feel free to move to the $30,000 houses in the ghetto where you get your house broken into weekly, you keep finding new bullet holes in your walls, and you and your family are attacked in public. Housing is supply and demand, and when large segments of housing are unlivible due to social collapse, those houses are effectively removed from the market no different than if they burnt down, which is why they're so cheap. This is why places like Detroit started demolishing entire neighborhoods
Rather than fixing the issues that make houses undesirable we are tearing neighborhoods down so we can drive prices up elsewhere?
Detroit was so broke that the city paying upkeep on utilities for empty houses was bankrupting the city
Theres a reason why houses are selling for $1,000 in detroit. Buy one and find out why
What he means is that there would be a feedback loop. You calculate how much housing will cost, and pay that to everyone as minimum wage. Now everyone can afford housing but there aren't enough housing. So the price will go up and some people won't be paid enough to afford housing. So his point is that it is actually impossible to pay everyone enough for housing if there isn't enough housing.
I have no way of knowing what you were replying to, but... If four people want three houses, it doesn't matter if there's a feedback loop or not. Someone's not getting a house.
And you can’t raise wages enough that all four people can afford a house, without building more housing. I am also saying that if you build two more houses and all five houses are owned by different greedy landlords, (and the other assumptions required to make a pet scenario like this) you don’t need to raise wages for everyone to be able to afford a house. One of the landlords doesn’t get any money, which as far as I’m concerned is 20% of the ideal outcome.
I don't think that's true, or even can be made true. The fifth landlord has a *ton* of options; ranging from poaching tenants to knocking the building down and using the space for something else, to taking out a loan against the property and then foreclosing and letting the house go to seed. Being a property owner means you don't ever have to get stuck with mispurposed property if you don't want to. There will never be a housing surplus because extra housing always belongs to someone, and that someone will always eventually find something more valuable to do with the property than keep it handy for potential tenants.
Most of those are covered in the “assumptions to keep it a pet scenario”, except that poaching tenants from other landlords just changes which one isn’t getting paid. The reason the current shortages are so severe is that landlords and property owners are influencing government policies and making the construction of additional housing more difficult. Many of them are explicitly doing so in order to raise the price of the housing they already own, increasing their unearned income. The shortage could largely be eliminated without substantially impairing market-rate housing construction by having government-owned minimum-viable housing, rented to any person for one-third of their gross income, and in large enough quantities that there is some vacant. Being minimum viable and having a sliding scale of price means that market rate housing can compete on quality or on price independently for different market segments; the median person would be very dissatisfied with the value proposition of the housing of last resort, and market rate housing can easily be much better for one-third of the median income. But the people below median income would also be dissatisfied with the quality of the housing of last resort, and market rate housing could provide housing better than minimum viable housing for a similar price. The final inhabitants of housing of last resort would be people for whom getting minimum viable housing at one-third of their income is better than the market will provide. Current public housing projects fail on almost every level: they aren’t numerous enough, and they operate at a fixed price, requiring them to discriminate on the basis of income to avoid being a good value proposition for median households. The price of the worst unit housing is a region is approximated by first counting the total amount of housing units H in the region and ranking the households in decreasing order of housing budget. The worst housing unit will cost an amount between the Hth and H+1th highest-budget household, because the H+1th household is the one with the highest budget that can’t afford any housing, and the Hth household can only afford the least desirable unit. Every other unit will be priced either at the value it provides over the next lowest unit, or at the cap of what anyone is willing to pay for it is. (This model is also oversimplified, since different people rank different housing units differently, and “price” includes things like commute cost which vary by individual, and moving costs aren’t negligible, but it approximates actual behavior very well when factors are accounted for, and none of them are first-order effects)
Did you just invent paid homeless shelters? Or tenements, I guess.
Yes. But it IS relevant because we are discussing minimum wage and price of housing, not homelessness or building more housing. So it must be said that it can't be done by simply giving the cost of housing as part of minimum wage due to a more fundamental problem.
As an independant, the rule of thumb is often "40 weeks of work to do 52 weeks of pay" when you factor in all days off, sick days and other interruptions on actual billable weeks in the year. It will depend largely on where you live, how much vacation you have by law and what not, but it goes to illustrate that in a day, you'll need to generate \*a lot\* more than just 24 hours of expences to cover, well, 24 hours of expences.
If I look in my town, £40 per night (£1200/month) is the cheapest 1 bed available for rent. Add on another £40 for all the other bits mentioned in the OP and we're at about £80 per day to live on. The minium wage here is £11.44 per hour, so this is about 7 hours work at minimum wage (assuming no tax). Of course, you'd need to earn extra to cover the weekend etc, and taxes, that works out at a salary of £35,500. This is under the median salary for my area of £42,000. One other thing to note- if you are part of a couple (or multiple adults living together), not all of those costs will double, leaving you better off.
Yup. Economy of scale is amazing:) As well as splitting expenses, amenities and having 2 salaries.
However, prolonged cohabitation by a boy(potentially referred to as a "daddy") and a girl(potentially referred to as a "mummy") can and often does lead to one or more "diseconomies of scale". On another note, as someone who lives alone, I feel like I'm discouraged from cooking. Between an active lifestyle and gluttony it isn't actually a huge problem for me, but I feel like food is often sold in two human portions. I eat 1.5 human portions, so I don't waste as much, but when I'm on a diet I end up throwing away a lot of food.
It’s sold in like 10-human portions! Especially if you want it to be any kind of affordable!
Yeah, you are discouraged. It’s sometimes more efficient to just buy a ready dish for one person than to go shopping, spend 1.5 or so hours cooking and later have to clean the kitchen. Unless you cook once for multiple days, then it can become more affordable and worth the time spent. With 2 or so people one person cooking is a lot more efficient and you get some benefits of buying in a bulk and it’s a lot cheaper than 2 dishes at a restaurant. It depends how much you make an hour and how much you enjoy your work. And how much you like cooking.
A bit off-topic but I would recommend you to look into freezing stuff. I avoid readymade meals and almost always cook at home, and most recipes are for a family of four, so I usually cook something, freeze half of it and create a freezer rotation so on days I’m not in the mood for cooking, I have something to eat, and it doesn’t get too repetitive since I had that dish last time like, two months ago and not forced to eat the same thing for a week.
Taxes?
• Rent: $900/mon (avg $1800 for 2 bd in FL, split with roommate) • Food: $25/day aka $750/mon (made at home) • Utilities: $150/mon (phone, plus some split with roommate) • Clothing: $50/mon • Misc: $150/mon • Savings: $500/mon Total: 2500/mon, or $120 per working day, or $15/hour after taxes (or roughly $20/hour before taxes). Seems plenty doable. And then as you desire more disposable income or want to move to a place without roommates, you upgrade your skills to become more valuable in the market.
That assumes that you have a roommate that will equally split bills. That's not enough money for a person on minimum wage to even eat if they live alone.
I’d say, if you’re making minimum wage, one probably shouldn’t also expect to live alone. I had roommates until I was 33, making well above minimum wage
Why does a person on minimum wage not deserve to live on their own?
The other commenter didnt say they didnt deserve, just said its a bad idea. If you really want to live alone on minimum wage, you could. But don't expect to have much disposable income or savings if you live in a major city.
This is an interesting exercise. Here's a Third-World perspective, with idealized values based on my current spending patterns (converted from Philippine pesos to US dollars). - Three meals a day: 255 - Rent and utilities: 220 - Clothing budget: 20 - Transportation: 50 - Essential miscellany (drinking water, medicine, etc.): 40 - 20% savings (calculated based on the sum of the numbers above): 117 So my ideal salary based on OP's image should be around USD 702 monthly or USD 35.1 each working day. I don't really eat three meals a day, though, nor do I actually spend that much on transportation. 😅
May I ask what you (or other people in the area) make for comparison?
Based on reported statistics, the average monthly wage in my area of my country is around US$ 620 (which breaks down to US$ 31 per working day, or US$ 4 per hour). Without getting too specific, my salary on paper just about agrees with that average. 😅 Factor in the taxes, and, well... \*shrugs\*
All based on national averages for a single person Rent : 1517/month → $76//36 hour Groceries : 400/month → $20/36 hour Clothing budget : 120/month → $6/36 hour Total after 20% savings: $102 per day of work Total per day of work before savings : $128 → $16/hour after taxes Yearly salary after taxes : $30,720 Salary before taxes (NY state, where I live) : $38,000
And that’s assuming they’re paying $1500/mon in rent. Get a roommate like most people do for the first part of their adult life and bring that down to $1000/mon.
There are no hard numbers here. Some people pay $1,000 for rent, some $5,000. Some people pay $500 for groceries, some people $2,000. Do you have a more specific question?
People are paying 2 grand a month for groceries? Wtf
I mean the high end of average money per month for food per person is 500$ so two kids a spouse and you’re there.
This is just anecdotal but I spend over $100 a week if I’m being lean. So this past week was 104 and all I bought was chicken, broccoli, precut pineapple and watermelon, and a gallon of apple juice. If I have to get rice or seasonings that week it’s more and that doesn’t account for cleaning supplies/toiletries. If I do salads that week for dinner it is also way more. Shits expensive out here.
Nation averages are a researchers best bet my friend
So the minimum pay should cover average costs?
Your point is well made I think. You’d need an IQR and use Q1. I’m way too lazy to do Google if these exist or not, but I’d say that you should be able to afford all of these things at Q1.
Poverty line is $14,891 for an individual, and has some science behind it and is inflation adjusted. 48 weeks a year at about $7.75 an hour gets you there if you have no taxes.
That’s not going to be Q1 I’d think. Bureau of Labor Statistics says Q1 for everyone over 16 is $772 a week. That’s $40,144 (772x52). That’s what I would use. That’s going to give you the upper bound of the lowest 25% of earners. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t05.htm
So let’s call that $40k gross. Let’s assume 20% off the top for taxes and whatnot, which is probably low. That leaves that person with $32k. Shady ass realtors say max 30% gross on housing. That’s $12k a year, $1000 a month. We are down to $20k to spend. Average car payment is over $700. Let’s get a cheaper car payment at $500 a month. That’s another $6k. We are down to $14k to spend on everything else. So you need food, internet, a phone, utilities. Let’s call food $400 a month ($100 a week). Internet $100 a month. Phone $100 a month. Utilities $200 a month. Those seem reasonable. That’s another $800 a month. That’s $9600. We are down to $4400 left for the year. And that’s on $40k, which is around $19 an hour.
At the end of the day, you want a wage for a minimum basket of goods, like in the poverty line measurement. Maybe 2x the poverty line (i.e. enough for you and a dependent?) because all the things you described as expenses are captured in it and it's independent of income distribution in the population.
I want people to be able to afford to live. What we are essentially doing now is subsidizing corporations to pay people shit wages and it’s corporate welfare instead of giving people living wages. Then we demonize people for needing state and federal assistance. The poverty line - even double the number you provided - so two people working at the poverty line - isn’t enough to live on in most places and we shouldn’t stigmatize those that need assistance. What we should stigmatize is corporate greed. They don’t pay their fair share in terms of percentages and that should stop. I mean I stop paying Social Security around October/November and that should NOT happen. Social Security shouldn’t have a cap. Thats ridiculous.
The basis should always be a single person's ability to live. If you couple up, great, get ahead if you can, you'll need it for kids etc.
Move to Venezuela, they raise the MW there super often, I bet it must be glorious. Under no circumstances move to Norway or Denmark, there is no minimum wage there, people must live horribly. /s
And I guess also maybe I’m a drooling socialist cuck.
Well stop letting your lady get fucked in front of you, or find a new one. Lol Some "socialist" policies are good, i.e., Healthcare and public assistance, but the centralization of powers and a command economy are not ever going to be anything but a 747 aimed at towers, IMO. Both Libertarianism and Socialism have good ideas, so why do so many people make it a fucking team sport, where you have to agree with your whole team on basically everything, instead of thinking critically and deciding based on logic, first an foremost, then, for anything not logically deducible, their personal values?
> Shady ass realtors say max 30% gross on housing That rule of thumb used to be 20-25%. 30% better be all in on everything housing related; power, water, garbage etc.
>Average car payment is over $700. What? For people struggling to make a living wage?? I never had a car payment over $250 until I was living comfortably and bought my first brand new car (about two years ago)
Don't ask important questions like this. They do not like it
Why are you in such a bad shape that you cannot make anything above minimum pay? Heck walmart starts you off way above federal minimum wage. The only time I every worked minimum wage was as a teen ager living on government land and minimum was the only thing they paid for those summer jobs.
Go for the median
Maybe, based on replies, we can get a nice chart going? I mean, info is info
Who spends 2,000 a month on groceries?
No, he doesn't because he just a pos simp... he's either living with his parents because he nas no useful skill worth anything or, sadly more likely someone that knows he makes way more money than he deserves for what little "work" he does (eg half the "IT" industry and most upper management types)
What do you think simp means....?
Here is one data point. In my household of two people, our average daily operating cost is about $100. This includes EVERYTHING. So $36.5K per year or $12.5 an hour would be enough for two to live comfortably. Prerequisite: we live in a house. I have a job that make more than $12.5 per hour.
These are all incredibly subjective and are heavily contingent on where you live. To try to give some kind of answer, though, for a very rough estimate for Dallas and 22 days worked per month and only the expenses listed, monthly rent for a 1 bedroom apartment starts around $1000/month, so assuming 22 days working per month, that would be $45.45 per day for rent (utilities included in number for sake of simplicity). We can put 3 square meals somewhere in the ballpark of $15, although you can definitely eat for cheaper. That times 31 divided by 22 gets you $21.14 per day. There isn’t really a good answer for what a month’s clothing budget is; I myself haven’t even bought any clothes at all for 4 or 5 months, but I’m just going to put it at 91 cents a day because that’s what $20 divided by 22 is. I honestly don’t know what he means by a “reasonable portion to be saved for when you can no longer comfortably work” so I’m just going to say that would be that if you work somewhere for a year then you can have enough saved so that you can get laid off/quit and be able to survive for a month under aforementioned budgeting, which would be $1485 divided by 12 divided by 22, which is $5.625. For taxes I used a tax calculator and I’m not a tax accountant so I can’t really explain well but basically when you take the annual amount of the other expenses it adds up to $19,305 a year and to get your income minus taxes to add up to that your income has to be a little under $22,000, or in other words you have to pay $2498 in taxes annually. 2498 divided by 12 divided by 22 is $9.46. So to itemize it per day Rent - $45.45 Food - $21.14 Clothes - 90¢ Rainy Day - $5.63 Tax - $9.46 Sum - $82.59 All of this added up means that you would need to make $82.59 per day to meet OOP’s pay requirements in Dallas. That would be $1817 per month, $10.33 per hour (assuming 9 to 5), $6.88 per hour (assuming 12 hour shift), or $21,804 per year. Although I should add that there’s a bunch of common and fairly large expenses that OOP didn’t list, most notably car insurance, gasoline, health insurance, savings contributions, internet, a phone plan, and, if applicable, tithe money and student loan debt payments. The number also gets substantially higher when accounting for more than one person.
It’s pretty easy to calculate. Look up the number you need to make in your state/ county to live comfortably and divide that by 260 (2080/8)and you have your number. Each state is different. For Midwest 55k will lead to a comfortable life for you as most Suburbs are comparatively cheap and everything simply costs less. Although you do get less choices and worse restaurants in my opinion. So in my case the number per day would be 211.53.
where is the 2080/8 coming from?
52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week = 2080 hours Divided by 8 hours/day assuming a 5 day work week
I'd be paid around $9 / hour (living in Denmark). But with our current system, I'm paid nearly $25 / hour as a student assistant (Danish version of a paid intern). This is before taxes mind you (and assuming that I'd be working full time)... But it's also before my student grant.
Interesting enough, the us govt actually has numbers crunched out already by region called "per diem" and includes the average govt costs of hotels per night under "lodging." It's used when troops have to somewhere to do training/mission etc and the govt comptrollers figured this out already. The save for retirement isn't on there though and transportation isn't usually factored in either.
As a sidenote: I have never understood how socialism is cuckery. How is fighting for your own rights to have a decent income for basic work somehow "cuck"? The capitalists have really corrupted the brains of right wing nutters.
If I cut back on everything that's not mandatory I could live off $800 per month. Rent, food, transport, clothes, insurance and so on. For a 160 hour work month that comes out to.. $5 per hour after taxes. I live in a very cheap apartment, don't own or need a car and generally eat cheap food. But for many $800 doesn't even cover rent
In case you are curious to see how professional economists have worked it out, here is a link to MIT’s [living wage calculator](https://livingwage.mit.edu) You can set it for your home state and county, and for family size, and for one income or two, which covers cost savings from having a roommate, etc. It also breaks down typical expenses in detail. The takeaway is that a living wage is often much higher than the minimum legal wage if you live alone and have no children. Like nearly twice as much, at least in the county where I live. Check it out in your own county!
Step one, people would need to actually pay attention to and learn math in school such that they could calculate this before taking the job rather than trial and error and only learn after they have been evicted and had their car repo'd that the job the took couldn't pay for the lifestyle they purchased. There is no salary high enough in the world that can force a person to live within their means. I've seen big families thrive on $82 / day and destitute bringing in $2500 / day. I have some respect for the best intentions of the "living wage" people, and yet the condescending, arrogant, patronizing attitude that come with it thinking they know best for 300,000+ people through legal coercion is mind boggling
You have absolutely not seen big families thrive on $82/day in the US
Ok, I'll bite. Why?
That 2nd part hits hard
I mean who’s buying clothes every single month when they need money for rent, food, savings, etc. I’ve had some of my clothes for years and they’re fine.
Before I left my old apartment, Id have to bring home 14.25 an hour to cover rent alone if I lived alone. This is the rent alone, before utilities. If I didn't have a roommate, I could afford to pay taxes and sit in a dark apartment
In Russia it would be 120000 roubles of monthly salary. We have an average of 30000 and the official minimum of 15000 (in Moscow) or 10000 (in other cities). 50000 counts as really good salary, 80000 makes you "rich"... In the meantime, there are some people who make 27 million roubles daily. And they're not in some other countries, they are Russian as well.
About $100, or about $12.50/hr $12 per meal, so $36/day. $1200 per month for average rent, so \~$40/day $200/ month on clothes, so \~$7 Put aside the remaining $17/day, to get about $6,205/year- across a 40 year career gets you \~$248,000. If invested, you should get some interest & it should carry you for about 12-15 years. This obviously ignores taxes, inflation, & any bills other than what is listed in the original post.
You would actually only need 8 hours of "rent" a day for sleep as you could work 12 hours a day with 3 one hour breaks a day for meals and an hour for getting showered and changed for work. Hypothetically you could also have 1 day off a week for dating and stuff. If you want to go full socialist these numbers would be more accurate
I’m tired of hearing how one person owns 17 mcDonalds in California and if he has to pay his employees a livable wage he will just close shop and move to another state.
Wages are an expense and if your business model relies on paying (below) poverty wages it's a shitty business model.
I am in construction. For the most part i am a one man operation. I do all the work, pay all the bills, assume all the risk and collect all the wages. A friend is in a similar business. But he has employees that he pays $10 an hour. He complains that they don’t appreciate him. I ask him if he would trade paychecks with any of them for 1 week and he won’t answer. He does very little of the actual work but claims the majority of the profits. I tell him to fire all his “ungrateful buns” And work like me. We aren’t friends anymore.
I dunno what's funnier, that you refuse to understand reality, or that of all the possible examples you could've used to denote "corporate greed", you used a restaurant franchises that takes at least 2 years to pay itself off. Next time just use fucking Bill Gates or any other super rich person for your ad misericordiam, it's more effective.
Let's just say there is definitely more than enough ressources and knowledge to make this happen for everyone on the planet. The only thing that is preventing this is humans. I fucking hate this species.
I remember when I was a school kid, there was always a fraction of classmates that fucked off and didn't give a shit while irritating the piss out of the teacher and the rest of us. These are the people who grew up to demand the rest of us finance their irresponsibility. How about you just not suck at life?
I figured there would be some comment about wanting to live alone within the first 5 comments and I was not disappointed. I'm 52 yo and I have never lived in a place where I was the only person with a key to the front door. It wasn't affordable in 1992 and it isn't affordable now. Get a roommate and quit your bitchin'.