You can get a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment where I live in a decent low crime location for $700-$1000. There’s an Amazon wear house up the street. It’s a city >250k people.
People around here make $40k on average and still go to sports games, bars, dancing, etc.
It depends where you live.
The expansive public transport network allows you to live far from the city without incurring huge commute times. That paired with the density means that car ownership is discouraged, which takes away another expense. Lastly, the city continues building multi-family middle housing in the city outskirts which keeps housing availability high.
High density and walking/public space culture comes with many other advantages. High footraffic means restaurants can run low-margin, high-volume food that poor can afford. The public spaces mean that restaurants can operate low-overhead businesses out of food trucks and holes in the wall.
Speaking if public spaces, they've generally (idk how, it is more localized there) managed to avoid the violent homelessness problem of the other major cities. Violent homelessness disproportionally affects poor people as they are more reliant on public spaces and safety in numbers. This has helped the city avoid an SF/Portland/Seattle-esque deterioration of entire neighborhoods.
Most American cities don't have any of these pros, which leads to skyrocketing costs associated with city living.
The public transit system is insufficient. The Commuter Rail is infrequent, slow and often unreliable. The entire system needs to be electrified for RER service but that’s probably twenty years away if we are lucky.
And the homeless have just been concentrated into one shantytown at Mass and Cass.
My praise for Boston was in comparison to absolutely shambolically run cities in the rest of the US. In comparison to some well-run global cities, (Greater) Boston still has ways to go.
> Mass and Cass
Yep, Methadone Mile is the uncomfortable compromise between liberal: "don't evict the homeless" versus the moderate: "keep our neighborhoods safe" agendas. It keeps the rest of Boston relatively aggressive-homeless free, but the addicts and local residents are worse off.
> entire system needs to be electrified
At times, it is jarring to see the US do worse than 3rd world countries. The mind-boggling cost of any infrastructure in the US is really holding the country back.
Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning subreddit that even starts approaching discussions of renting, or landlords, or landlord-tenant relations, and you'll get flooded with comments so detached from reality it will stun you.
This is what folks are talking about. Expecting things to just fall into place 'just because' without having to do the legwork to actually make/find something workable.
We know where the employers and residential zones are. We could put together a model to minimize average commute time.
The problem is that we need to have a grand "rehoming" moment to deliver it. The day where everyone gets assigned a new residence in accordance with the optimization scheme. A day that would doubtless be deferred to long past the heat-death of the universe in endless court challenges by those who ended up on the losing side of the deal in some way.
In a way, the fact we still have powerful regimes which aren't tied down to "rule of law", and specifically the "property rights as sacred" segment of it gives me hope; I'd expect to see this day occur in Beijing long before it happened in San Francisco.
Don't threaten ME with a good time!
Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.
It actually is. Rents are expensive because zoning laws severely limit density and require lots of car parking.
If we just respected property owner's rights to do as they see fit we wouldn't have these problems or not nearly to the same extent.
Maybe you've got some good examples from other countries, but here in the US the only major city with reasonable zoning is Houston which has quite affordable homes.
I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a startup trying to do this: https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-housing.htm...
SROs, residential hotels, boarding houses and the like were all banned in the 1950s (and the surviving ones dismantled through the 1980s), a loss of about 100,000 units of affordable housing.
Consider this lovely e-book for further reading: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
Or this lovely Simon and Garfunkel song about the NYC homeless on the streets of SoHo, contemporary to that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVnPIE3juc
So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?
Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.
Because "better a thousand rental units go un-built than let one slum lord construct a substandard basement apartment" or some other garbage like that.
Basically people keep trying to set a quality floor that society mostly isn't rich enough to afford and most land can't be developed enough to justify then acts surprised when the actual densification that happens is only a slow trickle.
They've done great. We lived in a rural area. It was possible because one of them came highly skilled and solicited to immigrate.
That being said I shudder when I hear "just move to rural blah blah blah". My life was horrible there. I was considered black, egytian, non-english speaking, to come from a family of savages or royalty or witchcraft depending on the speaker.
This whole "move to a rural place" really doesn't seem open to the non-white growing majority. Its certainly nothing like the Californian life I live now where I still cannot afford a home but can enjoy Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, Korean, and american culture in a form of acceptance that was fully closed to me growing up.
[0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
It was a lot easier doing business in the UK. We had relatively low accounting overhead, the laws were not hard to follow, and we didn't have to deal with having employees and customers sprinkled over a dozen state jurisdictions.
We're fortunate to work in a growing and lucrative market, but it's not all peaches and cream.
So, yes, doing your own corporate taxes in the US is likely not a good idea, especially if you hire people across several states. But the cost of an accountant is a minuscule cost compared to paying X% more across your entire payroll (not to mention other aspects).
The heroic labor of immigrants notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that would be possible for a fresh-off-the-boater today. I told my 20-something kids about it and they just laughed, like hearing about someone who stumbled across a pot of gold or a magic goose in a fairytale. I can't say I blame them.
Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
And that had an inflation adjusted earning potential of $4.81/hr (approx, in 2021)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
If you think working and living conditions are worse now than they were in 1933, I'd love some concrete examples.
I'm not saying things couldn't be better. I'm saying that most people talking about this seem to be completely devoid of context about life at all, and most proposed solutions just come across as strong arguments that they have no clue about the world at all, or why anything is the way it is.
Which is a solid vote in the column of 'changes proposed won't accomplish the stated goals, and will cause way more problems'. In my experience, anyway.
In my experience one of the biggest issues is that no one reports companies doing shitty things, and the labor orgs in the gov'ts get away with ignoring shitty things, because no one holds any politicians accountable on labor issues because most of the population is super complacent about everything.
Hell, Amazon and a number of other companies are super blatant about their ACTIVELY ILLEGAL ANTI-LABOR ORGANIZING, and not a peep seems to be coming from the appropriate labor departments.
And since everyone is super complacent (barely any protests even), then of course nobody cares. Because nobody is making them care.
If everyone really feels so badly about it, make it known by making them feel badly about it. Instead everyone seems to go back to candy crush after posting complaints online about how terrible things are.
We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.
I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies.
Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation.
Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see.
And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
But they are limited to differing degrees due to policy. Our current state isn't inevitable.
Generally, It’s a means of locking in stasis in a particular field in general, or restricting competition to the ‘have’s’, just like the old Guild setup before that. Still very much a thing for MD’s in the US.
There is a reason why France in particular is notorious for not getting anything done.
German’s do it too of course, but in their own way which is focused more on results, so it tends to be less sclerotic and more productive.
It’s always a trade off - more protectionism, or more churn/chaos/competition. If they can provide good labor protections while maintaining economic growth enough to ‘lift the tide’ overall, hard to fault them. It’s easy to go so far that it strangles the economy and locks everyone into a pointlessly inefficient setup in favor of the protected classes though. (And they won’t necessarily be rich protected classes either).
Europe’s tide hasn’t been rising very rapidly for awhile, and many EU countries are clearly insolvent overall (Greece, Italy, etc), so we’ll see how long they can sustain it.
And housing wise - to be somewhat on topic - very unlikely those Nurses in the UK are doing so in London.
The American Dream is typically "come to the US with nothing and build a comfortable life, no matter who you are". I still think that's possible. Guaranteed? Of course not.
The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.
Consider a place like London. It's bloody huge, and much of it is quite expensive. At the end of the day, London is going to need people staffing grocery stores, and cleaners, and that kind of thing. Not the entire population can be software devs or whatnot working from home, and you can't push them all outside of London.
If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much everybody could afford an apartment.
Anyway just penciling out the math, a $15/hr wage ($31K/yr) puts you in the 12% federal tax bracket and the 4% California (for example) state tax bracket. So your take-home would be $15/hr x 2080 hrs/yr x (1 - 0.12 - 0.04) = $26.2K/yr. So at that point rent ($1K/mo = $12K/year) is a good 45% of your take-home pay, and you've got $14.2K left to pay food, utilities, transportation, and (hopefully not) healthcare. It can be done. Each thing tends to trade off with other things. For example, to avoid healthcare expenses you'll want to stay healthy, eating healthy food for example. But healthy food is expensive, and probably not located close by your shitty part of town, so you'll be either driving (expensive and to be avoided) or spending extra time on public transit, or risking a catastrophic healthcare expense by biking there (in America anyway), or just eating the regular ol' cheap food. Also, do not take on any dependents. Like I said, it can be done.
Workers today are so entitled, demanding an entire studio apartment the audacity.
What percentage work into it?
What percentage is it laughably out of touch for anyone and everyone who isn't top 1% of anything?
That is what folks mean with the unrealistic luxury part.
It's not the rule, and it's probably less common than it used to be.
A few minutes later: "It's not uncommon" is going too far. It's certainly not unheard of.
Typically, folks move in with room mates. Or into communal living (like a dorm). Or in with a girl/boy friend. Or find a job near where they live (not try to live right next to a job). Or any one of many other situations which the poster seems to think are unacceptable, yet very common - and probably the best setup anyway, since it's not like they have any experience living on their own most of the time.
I personally moved out (and in with room mates) when I turned 18, and was working full time before then. This was in a low cost of living, mostly rural area.
The number of folks who can move out of their parents place and have their own individual apartment RIGHT AWAY?
Laughably small, and generally if so it's funded by their parents. It's always been that way.
I took your comment as a reply to that topic, I guess I still don't understand what your point was in relation to that.
I also think we can take a look at what drives costs for less expensive housing. My small town is basically allergic to larger apartment buildings, I think probably because the people with control don't want them (vs any good reason). One project got cancelled with people talking, with straight faces, about the historic nature of a post war car dealership building. Another got refused because people were afraid of having low cost housing adjacent to a hypothetical business hotel (a business hotel proposed to be in the middle of a bunch of parking lots, it was ridiculous).
The second one there would have been conveniently located for people filling the low income jobs we are talking about!
If your argument is that a meaningful number of people who historically would not have had room mates, now do, not because of a different set of choices they are choosing to make, but rather due to economic situations requiring radically different choices then maybe some data would be useful?
I know a lot of people who are clearly choosing to live in a city who probably don't need to. I know of many people choosing to have room mates because of economics, but would historically likely have made other choices (cohabitating with a boyfriend/girlfriend, moving to a different location, getting a different job, etc.).
In 2016 I was on £16.82, I had to share a house with four other adult housemates and had no prospect of owning a property within a 10 mile radius, it's only gotten worse since. God knows how any unskilled people doing these jobs are supposed to live with any dignity.
In Australia (where that $43k is from), the median rent for a 2 bedroom unit is $436 a week - $1700 a month. Very affordable with housemates or a partner also on minimum wage. In cheaper suburbs or 1 bedroom units, this is cheaper again.
I am surely in an outlier market so your point stands, I'm just speaking from where I sit, not trying to muddy the waters with hyperbole.
What would you define as the bottom of the barrel then? There has to be a sensible threshold that delineates between 1) "I encountered a lot of bad luck but I am motivated and want to get myself out of this situation and 2) I simply don't care. Most of the physically able that fall under 1) can get a job at an Amazon warehouse. For those in poor health, I will agree that the US is no match for other countries.
> 42k is a joke when your rent is close to $2500
You are approaching this subject as if living in an area where rents are $2500 is a right and not a privilege (the median rent in the US is $1,104 [0]). You might be shocked to hear that even in the most socialist countries in the world, there are gated neighborhoods and areas that are off limits to the poor (I experienced this first-hand living in a country that's often used as a socialist success story). I understand that not living in high-income areas leads to bad schools and a ton of other factors, but this is not a US-only phenomenon. Taking the necessary steps to remove the variations in rent is a strong step towards full-blown communism, which comes with its own set of downsides.
> and you get no benefits.
Nonsense, Amazon has surprisingly good benefits [1]. I am all for bashing Amazon's various horrible practices (eg: launching white-label brands that steal data from their own customers, total disregard for trademarks in their paid search bidding, etc), but when it comes to benefits, it will be hard to find a warehouse job with better perks.
[0] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... [1] https://hiring.amazon.com/why-amazon/benefits#/
[0]: https://abc7.com/rent-prices-apartments-cost-of-realtorcom/1...
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
And you're approaching this subject as if Amazon warehouses are uniformly distributed throughout the country, such that median rents _matter_. They aren't, and they don't. Amazon warehouses are typically just outside of (or even within) population centers, where rents exceed median, often substantially.
How far should a person commute for a $15/hr warehouse job? How far _can_ they commute?
That's not normal, but it is simply what it costs to live in NYC or SF or London. I know tons of people who pay north of $2,500/month for decent (not fancy) apartments in central neighborhoods of those cities. And $3-$4k/month is very common for a single person.
And no, it is not simply what it costs to live in NYC, unless you think you absolutely must live in Manhattan below 96th st. This is like saying the cost of a car is $65,000, because the only car I accept is a BMW X5. Ok, if that is your standard, then yes a car will cost you $65k. But there are cars available for much cheaper, that will fulfill all the important roles that one looks for in a car.