As someone that volunteers at homeless shelters across the country, I can tell you your description is nowhere near close to reality and it is very strange that people get off on pretending things are dramatically worse than they are. Do you even do anything to help?

Hey, please don't cross into personal attack. It's much more interesting that you have firsthand knowledge—if you want to share some of what you know, so we can all learn, that would be great, and much more in the intended spirit of the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I kinda can't blame him, because it's common for people to paint a picture of homelessness as something that can easily happen to appealing, relatable people who are highly functional by middle class standards. I hate it, because it reminds me of how conditional empathy is. Empathy is a skill, and like any other skill, it's developed through practice, and we mostly practice on people just like us. So people advocating for support for the homeless have to make them sound like they'd fit right in with the people who have the money and power to help them.

Almost half of American children spend at least one year in poverty

Not to mention, I don't know where you folks develop your anecdotes -- you really do meet a lot of totally ordinary, high-functioning adults in soup kitchen and community pantry scenarios. They just happen to be broke and hungry.

At any given time, most homeless families are only temporarily homeless, and most hungry families are only temporarily hungry. Life has its ups and downs. Most of the adults spend most of their lives working, just like everyone else does.

The "hardcore," long-term homeless, who spend years at a time unhomed, are not terribly representative of the great mass of Americans who have spent some time unhomed.

Poverty is endemic in America, and it's a hard time to be a working stiff, especially if you work in, say, the Bay area, as the comic's author did. ("Santa Luna" seems like a very thinly fictionalized Santa Cruz.)

A man like the author, in 2020, could very well find himself in the encampment he so obviously feared.

Broke, hungry, and poor are all different from being homeless. The vast majority of people served by food pantries are not homeless. Most people who can't afford to put a roof over their heads are sleeping under somebody else's.

I do get it. When people think about homelessness, when they cast a ballot, we don't want them to think about the "hardcore" (as you put it) unsympathetic homeless. We want them to think about the more relatable people experiencing transitional homelessness. People who are leaving an abusive situation, people working a job that didn't cover their rent, etc. The Rosa Parkses of homelessness.

And that sucks. It sucks that the "hardcore" homeless are so stigmatized that the only acceptable way to talk about helping them is to frame a larger problem in which they can be hidden away as an unrepresentative minority.

I don't think this thread was about stigma. It was about whether thing called homelessness can happen to otherwise functional people. Whether such a thing exist.

The thing about what you call hardcore homelessness is the serious mental health issues many of those people have. And that is much bigger harder issue.

Consider the inherent differences in the metrics you're using.

The comment that started this discussion involved observing people visiting a soup kitchen. Short-term homeless may outnumber long-term homeless in an absolute metric (I was homeless for a few months in 2014) but long-term homeless make many more lifetime visits to a soup kitchen and therefore comprise a higher proportion of the people you meet. They also comprise a higher proportion of the people who are at any given time living on the street. If you solve short-term homelessness but not long-term homelessness, you haven't made nearly as much of a dent in the shelter beds and tent cities as you have in the quoted statistic of people who are ever homeless.

I'm sure you do meet "high-functioning adults" in soup kitchens, but I would also doubt they're the modal attendees.

Your implication of certain people making more lifetime visits implying that a majority of the visitors are from that group does not follow.

For example if a typical longtime homeless person would make (round number) 400 visits a year, and a typical transiently homeless person would make around 40 visits a year, then if eg there were 20 transiently homeless people a year for every longtime homeless person, then the makeup of a soup kitchen would be two-thirds transiently homeless.

I'm not making a prediction, I'm explaining an observation. I don't need implication, just inclusion.

Homelessness is something that can easily happen to appealing, relatable people who are highly functional by middle-class standards. Perhaps you weren't here when Doreen Traylor's article about being homeless for six years appeared?

Nevertheless, thank you for showing your privilege. Judgement made.

Please omit personal swipes from your comments here. They just make things even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Doreen Traylor proves that a homeless person can write, have an online presence, and make a living as a freelancer. The fact that you think that's important is exactly my point, that you think homelessness is a different issue depending on whether or not homeless people are capable of living a certain kind of life we value. It shouldn't matter. It's sad that it does.

Here in Seattle there are far more homeless people than there used to be. In Seattle at least, thing are much worse than they were. The cost of living in Seattle has become too high, and the wages aren't keeping up. The OP is right about that, if overly dramatic about the homeless being handed a death sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Seattle

What are your opinions on this DW documentary? Some of the homeless people interviewed here fit the OP's description perfectly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHDkALRz5Rk

It’s completely possible to live on a minimum wage job and not be a miser. The trick is to not live in a coastal megacity.

Source: myself, after college, working at a bakery in a Midwestern city.

This is kinda true, but leaves out the part that it is very hard to just move to the Midwest if you are poor in an expensive big city. First, you have to gather enough money to actually move. You will need a car and gas, and/or a moving truck. You will need first and last months rent (not to mention how will you find a cheap place in a city you have no connections in without being there?)

Then, you are leaving your entire support system when you move. When you are poor, your support system is how you live. Friends watch each other's kids while they work, they share needed things, they find jobs for each other, they lend money to each other when unexpected things happen, they let people crash on their couch when they lose their house.

Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.

> You will need a car and gas, and/or a moving truck.

Or a bus/Amtrak ticket, and some money to ship your stuff. This is me, twice. It's not that expensive. It's not even painful. It's normal - what most people do.

> You will need first and last months rent (not to mention how will you find a cheap place in a city you have no connections in without being there?)

I have never paid first and last month's rent for deposit. Having dabbled in real estate, I do know this is a thing and not that unusual. I also know this is not the norm. I've often paid deposits of amounts like $200. These are decent apartments - not crap ones, but not high end ones either. I remember the one time someone asked more than one month's rent, I simply found a comparable apartment a few blocks away. It didn't require much of a search because probably over 80% of the apartment complexes in that neighborhood did not charge that much.

As for finding a "cheap" place, all it takes is the Internet.

> Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.

Both having done this, and seeing others do this from the now expensive place I live in: I can assure you the success stories outnumber the fail stories 10 to 1. Easily. Your support system in the expensive city is not much use if you cannot afford to pay rent. Your argument has validity if you're moving between comparable cities, but we're talking about people who are, in a sense, already below 0. The baseline sucks, despite whatever social support they have.

Of course, if you're starting with $0 in hand, you're screwed no matter where you are. Barring medical expenses or similar sudden expenses, most people who end up there do so via the boiling frog syndrome. The trick is to get out when you see that your finances are dropping.

You say $200 like that's an amount of money that a person living in poverty could conceivably accumulate. I think you're massively underestimating the degree of economic despair that is present in parts of this country. Also, you don't mention kids anywhere - regardless of how responsible it was to have them in the first place, they're here now.

You leave out having kids, and the childcare support that is needed if you can't afford daycare.

Also, many poor people aren't starting with $0... they are starting with negative money

> Also, many poor people aren't starting with $0... they are starting with negative money

This was addressed in my comment - although perhaps I added that portion in while you were typing yours.

> You leave out having kids, and the childcare support that is needed if you can't afford daycare.

Definitely. There are many subtopics in this thread and my intention was to focus on only one, which was the expense to move to a cheaper city. With children, it's a lot more expensive, but to be frank, as per the original comment in this thread - you couldn't afford to live on minimum wage with dependents even in the 90's - that aspect has not changed and only gotten worse.

I was referring to a single person with no debt and a small amount of cash.

To be clear, I'm not saying anyone who is poor can get out of it easily (or even at all). I'm saying some definitely can. Nor am I saying there aren't institutional problems that make it harder for people and easier to get into debt (predatory advertising and loans, for example - heck - the whole credit system). In many ways being poor in the US is worse than in many/most developed countries. I acknowledge that.

But there's a difference between a bad situation and an impossible one.

I merely want to push back on a sentiment I see often on HN and other places (and usually only by people earning good amounts of money) that it's a bad idea or incredibly difficult to leave a coastal city to move to a cheap one and do better there than here. I see it time and again on these threads, and for me it's a huge cognitive dissonance, as I've lived in both places, and have encountered several people in both places who made the move. It's not easy, but as I said, the success cases far outnumber the failed ones.

The last set of people I know who moved from my city to a cheaper one were low income workers (cooks in a restaurant who were treated poorly). They had families with kids - some did not have a working spouse. They saw cheap houses in Ohio (under $100K) and immediately made the move. Granted, they're now living in shitty neighborhoods (the only place you'll find such houses), but they have positive cash flow. And now that they're successful, their so called social support they had here is now considering making that move as well.

My scenario in my original comment was about getting a decent apartment. I've seen people come in to the cheaper city I lived in with not enough cash to make any kind of deposit. Yet most were still successful in the long run. The exceptions were people with some kind of chronic problem: Drugs, health issues, crime related issues, behavioral issues (can't handle bosses) etc. They'd usually find some charity/religious institution who would provide them a roof for a fixed period of time and in that time they'd find a job and then move out to a real apartment. Most of these cities will have places that will rent you a room for fairly cheap. Crappy neighborhood, etc.

The contrast is with staying in an expensive city where no matter what they do they will not get positive cash flow. Whatever your views on the topic, keep this one fact in mind: The baseline we are comparing against is staying in a city with negative cash flow.

> To be clear, I'm not saying anyone who is poor can get out of it easily (or even at all). I'm saying some definitely can.

I was not disagreeing that SOME people can move. I am saying that it isn't blanket advice that you can give to every poor person living in a big city.

My main issue is that the advice to 'move somewhere cheaper' is often used as a way to dismiss the seriousness of poverty, that all it takes is some personal decisions and you won't be poor anymore. In other words, it is poor people's fault for being poor (because they choose to live in an expensive city).

Yes, there are lots of techniques that many individuals can use to improve their personal situation. However, that doesn't mean that we have solved the societal issues that are leading to widespread poverty.

You are making very general statements and treating them as if they apply to the entire homeless population. If you have an interest in fixing problems you should appreciate that people's circumstances vary and so will solutions. The parent's solution will work for many people in poverty: most poor people are young, and most young people do not have children, so moving to a cheaper locale is in fact viable for many homeless. Also, you don't necessarily have to up and leave everything you know; living an hour from the city is often sufficient.

Most poor people are young without kids? Have anything to back this up?

There are some places you can go to college while working a part time minimum wage job during the school year and full time in the summer and graduate with only a few thousand dollars of debt while paying all your expenses.

Just because an expensive new car is very expensive does not mean that a vehicle is out of reach of everyone who can't afford an expensive new vehicle.

The market will only adjust wages if people are behaving rationally. Staying in a very expensive place with low wages breaks the market because it isn't rational behavior.

Some of the most desperate people I know are ones who grew up poor in a HCOL city (NYC, London, etc.) and who fell into low wage jobs.

At the same time as supporting the cities they live in doing all of the most fundamental work (cooking, cleaning, etc) they are regularly disrespected and told to fuck off somewhere else if they're struggling - away from the support network they rely upon and the friends and family who give their life meaning.

And yeah, some of them did move away but that sometimes made things worse because even though they might be financially slightly better situated in a different city, they didn't have a support network there.

Expensive housing is a political choice. Watering down the minimum wage was a political choice. These people falling through the cracks and suffering was the outcome of those deliberate choices to prioritize pumping up asset prices and profit margins over actual people.

Yeah, this is spot on.

Most people don't quite understand how homelessness works, and it's because of this whole "support network" thing. In most people's mind, homeless = bum living in a cardboard box. What actually happens in reality is someone falls on hard times and they move in with a relative, or bum a room from a friend, or etc, etc. That's what keeps them out of the cardboard box, and keeps them fed.

And that's why they're shit scared to move. Move, and all those friends and family can't help you. Even scarier, move, and you're probably scared the whole friends-and-family ties might get weaker - most people are always paranoid about whether their friends/lovers/etc still care about them, so they stay close to make sure they're "tending the fire" and keeping the friendship alive. It's human.

> The market

It is known that the FSP is holy, for it shall cure all our ails with nary a lift of our clicky fingers. /snark.

The market is us. We will adjust wages if people are behaving rationally - but people don't. The market isn't some external, independently existing force; it's observations about our collective actions. We're the market. It's weird (to me) every time that term is used that way.

> it isn't rational behavior

Of course not, people aren't rational, but even if they were, you'd still be (generally) incorrect. People coming to decisions that are against your expectations is much more commonly about your lack of visibility into other forces and information than it is about their cognitive processing.

One perspective is that people aren't rational. Another is that they are optimizing for different things than what you want to optimize for.

Last car I bought cost about $3000. Cost of insurance? Over half that, annually. More expensive if you do a monthly payment plan. And that's with a spotless driving record and favorable demographics.

And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y, not including gas.

Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.

> Last car I bought cost about $3000. Cost of insurance? Over half that, annually.

How bad is your driving record, and are you getting anything beyond liability? I have paid about that much, for 2 cars, and I have a lot more than liability. Even now, for 2 cars I'm paying under $1300/year - and have more than liability coverage. When I paid the bare minimum, for 1 car, the most I paid is $600/year. Even adjusting for inflation, it would not amount to over $1000/year today. And I paid that only for 1-2 years while building enough of a driving record. Looking at my financial records, when I had just liability on an old car, I typically paid $350/year.

> More expensive if you do a monthly payment plan.

Not all plans are like this. For the last few years I've been on a plan that costs the same whether I do monthly or annual. Shop around.

> And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y

First, if you paid $3000 for a 30 year old car, it's a bad deal. 2 years ago I bought a 15 year of Honda Accord for $3500, and it did not have a lot of miles. Second, if you're paying $3000/year for maintenance, you bought a bad car. Sell it and get a reliable car. As an example, I paid $350 this year for maintaining my car (including oil changes). I paid about $1100 last year. Looking at my prior old car, I've gone as low as $100/year. In fact, looking back at almost 10 years, that $1100 was the most I've ever paid for maintaining an old car.

> Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.

Good cheap cars are always cheaper than the alternatives. Always.

It may surprise you to learn that moving is expensive and difficult

There definitely is a cost associated with moving to a place where the skills you have are valued enough to support yourself. If the pain of changing is greater than the pain of staying where you are, then it is completely rational to stay where you are.

As a personal anecdote, I'm a college student who started at community college, worked during the summers, and even worked during the semester at jobs paying over $15/hr. Despite all of that, despite rarely if ever spending any money on "fun" things, I'm $30,000 in debt. Tuition and rent are just that expensive now. It's almost impossible to save up when you're throwing just about every dollar you're making just to keep yourself afloat.

My local community college costs about $11k per year. That includes room, board, books, tuition, and $4,000 of personal expenses for transportation, etc. The closest university is about $16k for everything except personal expenses, so let's add $4k to that to get to $20k (probably a bit high, but we'll use it to use).

So that would come to: $11k $11k $20k $20k ----- $62k

The $16k we budgeted for personal expenses is probably a bit high and I living on campus is much more expensive than other options, but at $15 per hour, you'd only need to work half time to cover all your expenses.

So lets say you work 20 hours a week for 39 weeks during the school year and 40 hours for 13 during the summer. That is 1,300 hours per year. You need to bring in $11.9 per hour to cover your expenses without being particularly frugal. If you live at home, live off campus and cook your own food, graduate a semester early, etc. you can drop your costs down by quite a bit.

For students who did ok in highschool (3.5 GPA, 29 on ACT) the university will give you at least a $2k scholarship. Pell grants will give you up to $5k that you don't need to pay back depending on your financial need. Graduating debt free is very VERY doable.

Yes, but, this particular guy was working in the suburbs of an expensive coastal city, while living in an exurb.

That's obviously not universal. But it is certainly the story of THIS guy, as well as many tens of millions of other Americans.

I’m certainly not arguing that rising inequality isn’t a bad thing, but your comment wasn’t about this guy, it was about Americans at large. Contrary to popular coastal belief, fly-over country actually has people, and culture, and life. The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.

It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.

Forty five million people live in the NYC and LA metro areas alone. NYC is about 3% of the national population. Los Angeles is another 2.5%.

The average American lives in a fairly considerable city, depending on your definition of "large." The vast majority live in cities of 100,000 or more.

Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs. For perspective, the #100 MSA is Fort Wayne, Indiana, at roughly 500,000 people.

Not to mention, struggling to make rent, homelessness, and poverty don't just vanish when you step away from the most expensive cities.

Living in "Santa Luna" (which I assume was actually Santa Cruz) instead of the suburbs where he worked didn't make his rent affordable in 1994, and it certainly wouldn't today, in 2020.

I’m not really sure what you’re arguing for. I didn’t say anything of those things were non-problems, I said that having a minimum wage job isn’t some kind of homeless death sentence.

It is completely possible to survive on a minimum wage job in many cities across the country. It isn’t luxurious, it isn’t fair, and it certainty isn’t ideal, but exaggerating the facts to make a sociopolitical point only makes the opposition have a stronger foothold.

I think it's very plain that holding a minimum wage job implies a tenuous ability to house and feed oneself in much of the country. It is not a complex thesis.

I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people

He's arguing that this statement is false:

> The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet

"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."

Demographic shifts are weird, man.

I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.

I’m not seeing where ‘urban area’ is defined in that document. I imagine it includes basically any town or city. The original issue was NYC/LA/SF vs. the rest of the country, not urban vs. rural. Plenty of college towns, for example, likely qualify as urban yet are extremely affordable.

It's worth noting that the Bay area, the entire metropolitan area, is about the size of Detroit. It's about a quarter the size of Los Angeles or New York.

It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.

> Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs.

Meaning just over half live in the rest, with far lower cost of living.

Well, "the rest" is a long tail of areas with between 100,000 and 500,000 people. Very few Americans live or work outside an urban area, and a very large fraction live in the largest urban areas.

Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.

Not disagreeing, just curious where your data came from.

The census data >80% of Americans live in urban areas but that’s loosely defined as any area with more than 2500 people

>> It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.

I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm an EU citizen and have never lived in the USA, but I am curious to know: have you, yourself, done this (what you say is absolutely possible)?

Yes, absolutely. During and after college (4 year university), I worked at a bakery in a fairly major Midwestern city. For working ~45 hours a week, I made roughly $1,200 after taxes. One room in a 2-bedroom apartment was $350, leaving me with about $850 for everything else. Definitely enough for cheap beer, groceries at Aldi, and other budget entertainment.

It certainly wasn't a luxurious lifestyle and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, but it also wasn't much different than living in a dorm at college...or even the startup lifestyle, seeing that this is HN. Absolutely doable for a young person (as the original link is about) and not a straight ticket to homelessness.

For what it's worth, I also spent quite a bit of time traveling around Europe and had many art student friends living on half as much money in smaller cities in France, Germany, etc.

Thank you for replying. I live in the EU and indeed wages are lower, but of course prices are also lower.

When I was 16, I worked at a bakery too, as an apprentice. I made a pittance and lived in a squat because I couldn't afford rent, but I enjoyed the work and I could eat of the produce to my heart's content (I have a big heart). This was in Athens, Greece, btw.

On the other hand, neither I nor you had a family at the time we worked such low-pay jobs and I suspect that a minimum wage job would not be sufficient for two adults wanting to start a family.

Did you have any significant medical issues?

This guy's story doesn't track, for so many reasons, but I'm gonna stick to the basics

1.) median wage in America for ALL workers is around $28k a year -- meaning this guy was, supposedly on his "minimum wage" job, earning more than fully half of all Americans. Think about that. He was in the upper half of the income distribution, on "minimum wage" ? really?

(A typical minimum wage job pays $10k a year BEFORE taxes -- 28 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, $7.25 an hour. It is extremely rare for low wage employers to allow an employee to work more than 29 hours a week, as it may oblige them to offer benefits at the 30 hour mark, and extra pay at the 40 hour mark.)

2. There is not a single state in the union where median rents are as low as he describes -- did he just rent the very cheapest room in the entire 50 states?

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/research/median-...

Americans love telling each other stories about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but they also love to omit the details of how they got things like 45 hours a week, or made more than 50% of American workers, despite working for a "minimum wage," or got paid time and a half on his "minimum wage" job, or found housing near a job center at below the median cost for even the most rural and blighted parts of the country.

All of these, individually, are staggeringly unlikely. Together, they come off as the luckiest man alive. It seems impossible unless he was working in his uncle's bakery and living in his brother's apartment.

(The refreshing thing about this comic is that the author didn't blow smoke up our asses about "bootstraps," it's very plain he felt lucky to escape his situation.)

I have not done this myself, but 2-3 of my friends are doing this currently in the midwest. One is working at a warehouse; one is working at a major home improvement store; and one is doing part time work which effectively amounts to minimum wage. Like the GP stated in his other post, their lifestyles aren't fantastic and they definitely are constrained in their spending, but they are hardly living in squalor: they have adequate, safe, reliable housing; they have functional vehicles; they have health insurance; they don't go hungry; they take driving trips; they come out to our group events and bring their own booze; and they are not in danger of becoming homeless. There is a huge delta between solidly middle class / upper middle class and poor / precarious or homeless which doesn't seem to be acknowledged.

Ahh, yes, but don't you know that if you don't live in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, or New York you can't do anything and nothing happens? You have to live in one of those four cities. /sarcasm

We are discussing a memoir of a man's life working in the Bay area and living just outside the same.

This memoir was not about Topeka, Kansas. Not that struggling to make rent doesn't happen in Topeka. Not that Topeka isn't filled with people living vibrant lives.

Just, this particular story occurred in the Bay area.

I know. I was speaking to the parent, and the 2000-2020 "you have to be in one of four cities" zeitgeist they are talking about.

I'm not so sure. Could he have moved back in with his parents? Could he have gotten a second job (at McDonald's or something?) I'm not suggesting that these would be good, or easy options, only that homelessness was not a forgone conclusion. This comic is only one man's personal story, and it does not necessarily coincide with the general demographic and economic trends of the time. ie, it's not clear that his story speaks about the particular hardships of one age compared to the hardships of another.

The American Dream has been replaced by perseverance porn: the only way to succeed is through hardship and the people who fail are losers.

I'm a millennial, I have never been drafted to fight in any war, I did not spend my childhood or early teens working on a farm, I was educated by a public school system, I have enough disposable income to have a computer, iPhone, and internet connection through which I can learn anything, I live in a safe community, people of all colors and religious beliefs are willing to do business with me.

In history there might be one maybe two generations that have had less hardship than mine, every other generation ever has had more hardship.

You sound like someone who is looking at your opportunity rather than trying to find reasons you can't succeed. :)

It is easy to complain about how hard life is, but I really don't think most people would be willing to trade it for some other time in the past--no matter how bad they like to think things are today. It is surprisingly inexpensive to live like people lived in the 1950s when TV, air conditioning, and even indoor plumbing weren't things you'd assume you had to have.

I'm wondering if success has ever not come through hardship. It certainly came through hardship in the past. Today seems little different.

Note: 80% of millionaires are first-generation rich - they started off with little, and made their own fortune.

> To put it another way: The author happened to be born very close to the peak for average Americans' wages, and every year since then has been an ever-tighter vice squeeze between declining wages and rising rents (in both the real estate and economic senses of the term)

Yeah... This isn't true. You can see the data here, among other places: https://www.statista.com/chart/17679/real-wages-in-the-unite.... The average real hourly wage is higher today than any time since 68 (which was the peak) and is about a dollar higher than the 90s. Note that this is the real hourly wage, so it's already inflation adjusted.

If this is true then why do I also see graphs showing that wages have declined in purchasing power since the 70s? Is it possibly that this chart is using "average" rather than "median"? Housing is everyone's largest expensive and I feel like I've seen figures that show housing has a percentage of income is something like 2-3x higher than it was 50 years ago.

> wages have declined in purchasing power since the 70s

This was true until 2019. Wages dropped in the late 70s and in the 80s, then went up in the 90s, spent the 00s mostly flat, and rose a little in the 10s. It took 50 years (until 2019) for them to go back up to the 1968 high. So "we've made no progress since 1970" economic quotes are mostly true, but "we've made no progress since 199x" economic quotes are mostly false.

post your charts, if you don't mind.

Averages are not relevant for something as skewed as income distribution. As the Gino coefficient rises the average is increasingly dominated by a minority. The OP is most likely talking about wages for jobs that actually pay by the hour, which have gone down along with the minimum wage from its 1968 peak.

State of Working America Wages 2019 (https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/)

Most minimum wage workers are alive and not homeless. Sometimes they live 10 to a 2-bedroom, especially the illegal immigrants who often don’t even make minimum wage, but the world you describe is not the reality out there.

Minimum wages should apply to anyone, no matter their status no?

Yes; the problem is that for a worker being paid under the minimum wage to rectify this issue, they probably need to produce their work authorization documents at some point, and therefore risk deportation/worse.

Why not simply get work authorization documents then?

I'll assume you haven't lived in the US.

It's not easy to get work authorization documents because there is a huge queue for legal immigration (for example, my friend's cousin just moved here from a country on the Indian subcontinent, after having waited more than 15 years for a visa), while people in Mexico/Central America/wherever need to improve their situation NOW; they simply cannot wait the decade or so it would take to obtain real documents, even if they had the money required to even start the process.

Living and working in the US without authorization is a criminal offense, and if caught by someone who cares enough, illegal immigrants will be deported and permanently barred from obtaining legitimate work authorization.

Of course, there's always the option of counterfeit...

Ummmm I’m homeless. I love my life.