Is working 40 hours per week but not being able to afford a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment a goal we want to set? If so, we have achieved it!

I think most of us like the idea that if you put in 40 hours of work every week, regardless of the specific job, you are able to afford a basic standard of living.

Even if you only do half thats a crazy stat. 600 million units and having to hit that right on the head in terms of the distribution of humans at all time.

According to the study, that standard would require a $30-40 minimum wage in places like New York. Is that something any country has done?

You ask "when did we decide that?". That implies that there is some discrete point in time in the past when societal decisions are made. But that's not how societies work, not how politics work. The way it works is that we are continuously "deciding" things like this, through conversations like the one here, and articles like the one we're talking about. It doesn't make sense to say, "this article is reaching for abstract targets that we haven't decided on", because there is no decision point in the past like that, we're discussing what we want right now, in this moment, and the article is part of that discussion.

You claim that ideas "we like" are not what is pertinent. But that's also not the way societies and politics work. If we as a society decide that this is a good thing to strive for, that "we like" the idea, we can do that. We can decide we want to do that and discuss it and brainstorm ways to achieve it. Looking at what other countries have done is definitely an interesting input in that discussion, but it certainly isn't the only thing that is pertinent.

I think you should just say "I am unconvinced that this should be a goal we have as a society". You seem to be trying to appeal to some larger power, some discrete ledger of things we have decided on, but really I think what you're saying is that you are personally skeptical of this, and perhaps that you believe many others in the society are skeptical of it. Which is cool (I may even agree with that, I'm not sure yet), but it would be more clear to just say that.

You're right that articles and studies often use terms like "housing crisis" that don't have objective definitions in a way that fits their subjective definition without doing any throat-clearing to call that out. But I don't think there is any real way around that, it seems like you just have to read things with that in mind. Maybe I'm wrong though. Should every article say things like, "there is no objective definition of a housing crisis, but the NLIHC believes this should be considered one". Perhaps they should!

Also, while I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Thanks for sharing it.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boswort...

Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.

From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.

There's a very good chance there are people whose quality of life would be drastically diminished if they had to share an apartment. Off the top of my head, those with embarrassing or inconvenient medical issues, single parents, people who always feel some level of stress around other people (there are a lot of us).

When setting floors by policy, we should think of the people who don't fit the norm. If they don't get help from somewhere else, they're screwed.

Historically, the EITC has been supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Start with the assumption that people need to be able to afford a place to live, and that a full time job should be able to achieve that. Do you agree?

Now, if we both agree that a housing subsidy program is an administrative nightmare, what's left? Simple: Regulating prices on the housing market.

A subsidy is a nightmare to administer; is subject to corruption, mis-targeting, abuse, and extreme wait lists; and drains public resources. So why do we do it? Simple: Because the real estate industry has lobbied the government to pursue this as a means to address housing inequality. Rather than being told that the earnings of their investment properties will be capped by regulation, the government is writing a check to make up the difference.

So now, after years of waiting, a single mother of two might get a 3/4 of her rent paid by a subsidy. The apartment needs to pass ridiculous inspections which are conducted historically by specialized contractors who benefit from failing due to re-inspection fees, and they will fail an inspection because a screw is missing from a light switch cover, blowing up a lease deal and elongating the timeline for a subsidized move-in by months. It sucks for the residents, and it sucks for the landlord from a administrative/management perspective (mainly dealt with by hired management), but at the end of the day, they have a government-guaranteed rent payment for a greatly inflated rent market. Coronavirus cut your tenant's hours?! No problem! At least 3/4 the rent will be paid, and the margins are still profitable.

And we wonder why wealth inequality is growing in the US! This literally inflates the rental market by creating more demand for overpriced housing than exists, by creating a class of people who can afford it only through a majority subsidy. It also encourages investment property purchases by doing so, in turn creating more competition in the buyers market and causing price inflation there as well. This also has the effect of keeping more people renting instead of being able to buy.

In conclusion, PEOPLE NEED HOUSING! Real estate industry doesn't need subsidies. Yes,that includes private landlords with investment properties. Someone else's housing or health care shouldn't be an unregulated investment opportunity if we care about the well being of the people.

In Stockholm, decades of rent regulation has created a massive undersupply of housing. That means there is a 9-year wait list for apartments. The way rent regulation usually works is it caps rent increases for a given tenant. Tenants thus never leave their apartments, so the prices for the few openings (and newly built apartments) is astronomical.

> Another legacy of Sweden's post-war efforts to develop a more equal society — known as "Folkhemmet" or "the people's home" — is rent regulation, which applies to both municipal and privately owned properties. While millions of Swedes have benefited from the highly affordable rent levels set since the 1960s, the caps have had a damaging effect on the provision of new housing.

> Historically, the low returns from rents for private landlords have made the investment case for building new rental properties difficult to justify, the Swedish bank analyst said.

> The love for rent-capped municipal properties among the Swedish people is strong. Almost 500,000 people were on Stockholm's waiting list for public housing, according to figures released in 2015, double the number from seven years prior. In 2014, the average waiting time to get an apartment in Stockholm was 9 years. Once a person is given an apartment, they often stay there for life. "People are sitting in 300 square-meter apartments because they are so cheap that they can't leave them," said Pelles.

The government made sure that there was enough supply of apartments. This was removed 30 years ago or so. The "Market" took over instead.

In the US, cities frequently have "zoning requirements" so it's very difficult to get a new high-density structure built in a neighborhood of 1-floor single family homes. Also, NIMBY groups usually have a veto vote of sorts, which makes it more expensive for a real estate developer to come into a pre-existing neighborhood and make more units (because it's a gamble and usually they have to spend more to acquiesce to the NIMBY if they are able to build at all).

Even when there is a rental price cap, that tends to only work in the short term and exacerbates supply/demand problems long term. San Francisco, for example, implemented a rent control system in ~1980. Since then, only 40% of rental units are eligible for rent control and lots of potential rentals stay off the rental market. There are loopholes which allow conversion of a rent-controlled unit to a market-priced rental and no new built units are rent controlled, so there is a bifurcation of the market. Rent controlled units are very affordable, but increasingly scarce. Market priced units are growing (slowly) in numbers, but cost 2x - 5x what a comparable rent-controlled unit does.

True, there are real supply issues in some very hot markets, but few markets are like San Francisco.

So--why do you say that the price cap is what exacerbates the supply/demand problems long term, when you clearly understand the issue is that there are loopholes being utilized to reclassify units to get the back to market price? Those loop holes aren't accidents--the NIMBY groups put them there intentionally. But they aren't just NIMBY--they are also private investors who do not even live there.

I'm all for building additional housing to meet demand in general. However, it does need to be done carefully. By that I mean, upgrading train stations, roads, grocery options, etc. in order to deal with the increase in population. You can't just add 15,000 people to a neighborhood and not add parking or public transit capacity.

That's exactly why suburbs in Silicon Valley are stressing the large cities and the cities are suing each other to ensure they alleviate traffic congestion as they grow the residential units.

Those who live in the burbs and commute into the cities don't want city dwellers to be able to make the reverse commute to come to their neighborhoods. In the 1960s, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (a light rail system) was designed to be a loop between San Francisco, Oakland and the South Bay. The NIMBYs rejected plans to close the loop in the South Bay, so it became much less valuable at reducing street traffic as it otherwise could have.

As if there isn't enough money in San Francisco to build roads and trains! The city governments certainly don't have it, but it's there.

I'll admit that the assumptions I make about rent control assume that the policy is far from well crafted and probably assume that it gets worse over time because US policy makers tend to get worse at upkeeping existing systems the longer they last.

These assumptions probably shouldn't be attributed to a perfect rent control policy.

I knew people who moved from Stockholm to Berlin and kept on paying their rent in Stockholm, just so they don't lose their apartment. That's how hard it is to get one.

Berlin also had a rent cap, so instead of competing on price, you had to compete on intangibles like: letters of recommendation from previous landlords, proof of income and good conduct, having a high-profile job, nationality, etc.

Since supply is low, demand is sky-high and prices are capped, you had 30-40 people applying for the same apartment. Add the fact that once a landlord takes you in, there is almost no way that they can kick you out and you will end up with a very complicated and long vetting process that doesn't exactly favor the working class folks.

Also, you can end up with other costly requirements like: the landlord will only choose a tenant who buys all the furniture in the house. That's one example of an unregulated cost increase that is not affected by the rent cap.

However, it doesn't justify the runaway inflation of the entire housing market. Also, I'd point out that generally speaking, the population of an area will be limited by the jobs available in that area, so there is an external limit on the demand for housing to at least some extent. There are jobs and money to be made in development of additional housing to meet the demand. Supply issues are not insurmountable, and should be addressed as such.

I'll also note that in the USA, all of the "intangibles" you listed are already typically collected by the landlord along with the leasing application itself. This isn't a result of rent caps, just high demand and standard tenant screening practices.

To solve problems, you may actually have to try. Obstacles don't justify problems, they just need to be addressed.

For me, it’s the definition of a minimum place to live. When I was young, I had roommates. I don’t think every working person should be able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment.

There are multi family dwellings, studios, boarding rooms, etc. If I’m by myself and making minimum wage then I think it’s ok to not be able to get my own one to two bedroom in the city of my choosing. I’m ok with having to live in the burbs and train or drive in. It sucks, but there’s no reason why minimum wage is a permanent condition.

Not everyone working minimum wage is doing it "when they were young." Do you really think it's a good objective for a 55 year old cook for a non-profit organization to be living with room mates? Would you want that?

The solution is there if you are willing to reduce the wealth generated by investment properties for an already much wealthier investment class. How do you justify your priorities ethically?

Do you think the world works according to ethical priorities or market forces? Imagine if engineers could use similar logic as political theorists. We could will our airplanes to fly by setting the right priorities!

You make a quip about engineers and political theorists, but fail to explain why a market cannot be regulated in order to benefit society in general. We do it all the time.

The difference between those two views of the world is the difference between political theorists and engineers. A political theorist asks questions like "how do you justify your priorities?" An engineer asks "how much do I have to give up on this one priority in order to achieve this other priority?" Engineers deal with a world where achieving every priority means giving up some other priority.

Applying this logic to your statement exposes the flow: "The solution is there if you are willing to reduce the wealth generated by investment properties for an already much wealthier investment class."

Sure, things like price control prioritize affordability at the expense of "wealth generated by investment properties." If that was it nobody would argue against price control. So why do so many people oppose price controls? (The answer is not, I'm sorry to say, that many people simply want owners of investment properties to be rich.) See: https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-eviden...

> Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. These results highlight that forcing landlords to provide insurance to tenants against rent increases can ultimately be counterproductive.

This, like many others, does not sound like a job that warrants minimum wage so no.

If the recommended rent is 30% of your income... well, the most you could afford on twice minimum wage is $768.

Where I'm at the cheapest rentals are 900 or so (rural utah).

Seems to me it takes almost 3x minimum wage just to really be able to live comfortably, and many will never get to that level, because they already work 2-3 jobs just to keep a roof over the heads of their children.

There's a reason that $75k is the 'happiness level', it really is the lowest of the low wages that will make someone feel like they're not poor and 'needy' and over-worked, etc... That should be our goal, to get us to that level for everyone over 25 who isn't in school. (Or able to reach that w/ a full-time job (even at McDonalds) + GBI/UBI)

Of course 55 year old me doesn’t want roommates, but if I have to do it for a few years then I will.

So you always have rent covered, regardless of your paycheck. They could maybe double that, and have it cover food stamps too, to cut out some of the administrative costs to manage both programs.

This works for married couples too, because you'd get double that, which is closer to what a mortgage would be, and would esp, help lower income families.

I think we could look into a VAT if needed for supplmental tax to cover it, but there's plenty of governmental spending we could also cut like maybe 1/3rd of the defense budget for one.

This site shows $1700 for a 2br in brooklyn.

https://www.apartments.com/brooklyn-ny/2-bedrooms/?so=2

Seems to me the problem is a supply issue, and we just need a bigger supply. That's an easy solve.

Those days are long gone and aren't coming back. So there needs to be some other contract that can guarantee a home for everybody.

edit since these details matter here: two apartments in question. One was a 1R without, the other a Studio with amazing view. Both were very pleasant, central, and I could have found cheaper had I been willing to not have them that central. /edit

So yeah there are much cheaper places than the US. German rents tend to be cheaper still, with higher wages.

That all being said, calling out the people at the very bottom for their lavish lifestyles / demands seems a bit disconnected from the economic realities at the moment...

A one bedroom is about 600€ a month.

A room of one's own is a lavish demand? Yes.

Those earning minimum wage aren't going to be able to afford "an average" apartment. They will likely only be able to afford a starter apartment which is more likely to cost much less than average and are more likely to live with family members or commute from a more affordable geographic locale.

Income in US is not directly comparable to most other OECD countries for multiple reasons. Labor laws (paid vs. unpaid sick days, vacation days, ma/paternity time off, union dues), taxation policies (local, state, federal, employer), health care costs (no nationwide price negotiation), health insurance costs (lots of problems here), school tuition costs (because the demographic highly overlaps with school-aged young adults), lack of public transportation in most geographic regions, etc all add up to costs which are obscured by using the simple "gross income after housing and maintenance" figure.

If anything, the article suggests the opposite. It notes that the average minimum wage earner would need to work 97 hours for a two bedroom, and 79 hours for a one bedroom. That reflects two full time minimum wage incomes: a working couple for a one bedroom, and a working couple with children for a two bedroom.

It is also worth noting that this is a very privileged position in many cases. If you are a committed couple, are rooming with a close friend or family member, or fit a limited number of other circumstances - this may be acceptable. Otherwise, it is effectively saying that it is okay to expose minimum wage earners at greater risk because, well, they are minimum wage earners.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm

Paris might be around 1200€ I think for a similar 1 bedroom but I am not very familiar with Paris. Maybe 1000-1500 depending on commute and location.

There is little left at the end of the money. You're not going to holidays or restaurants any time soon. Hope the car doesn't break or you're in serious troubles. Assuming you were handed a car by your parents because you certainly can't acquire one by yourself (3000 or 4000 upfront!).

Well, it's one of three possible goals:

1. Any worker can afford a roof over his/her head with their wage.

2. Universal public housing.

3. Millions of homeless people.

I actually think (2.) is just as important as (1.), but the US isn't very keen on economic activity for public benefit. Then again, it often seems like it's leaning towards (3.) ...

The median new home is double the size of what it was in 1973. In today's new houses, each person has about as much space as the entire solidly middle class 3BR house my four-person family lived in growing up.

Look what happens when politicians responsibly build post offices and the numerous other programs that made money until political meddling.

Look at what happened to workers when taxes were way higher! Omg those stupid politicians!!

Is the profiteering of a minority of the species a goal we have set?

Is your ideology the goal we should have set? Or is it just automated energy sucking deflection away from ideas that rustle your jimmies wrapped around your limbic system?

We share one physics, one planet. Just because you can imagine and emit alternate sounds to someone else doesn’t mean the ideas are feasible or real?

Reality comes with some pretty tight constraints. Progressivism away from grandpas political talking points is one of them.

Are we less free in some real way given the time wasting mess of our “free market”? Or would it be that your brain is just not used to processing the idea?

Are you measuring the impact to society and reality or just chomping at the bit to react?

Bureaucrats aren’t going away and already control your life in very intimate ways! Human society has yet to create that magical completely free system or completely gridlock itself to death.

Kind of wonder if you’re just shouting at a mirage. It’s just people.

Funny way to put "providing housing for its own citizens".

It's not a goal we set but it's one we mostly achieved none the less, depending on your specific area and minimum wage. A blue collar (minimum - low wage) worker used to be able buy a house and raise a family on a single income. People are poorer than they were decades ago, at least where it counts.

In a multivariable equation, you can't only look at one variable and call it a day.

How much has demand changed?

How much has the population of the USA grown?

How many immigrants has the US taken in?

How much more efficient is each marginal employee in a blue collar job now compared to then?

How well do USA exports compete with other countries?

How well does the USD exchange rate compete with the currencies of those other exporting countries?

How much have the average work benefits changed over the same period of time?

How much has the US cost of living grown?

What is the US labor participation rate?