It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.
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.
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'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
> 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.
It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.
Meaning just over half live in the rest, with far lower cost of living.
Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.
The census data >80% of Americans live in urban areas but that’s loosely defined as any area with more than 2500 people
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)?
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.
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.
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.)
That's obviously not universal. But it is certainly the story of THIS guy, as well as many tens of millions of other Americans.