In a vacuum, the ability to pick up multiple jobs and do different things would be a net gain to individuals, yes. Plenty of people would like to do different things throughout the week rather than having to change jobs for a change of pace. This also assumes it's an opt-in, so if you like working on the same thing 40h a week, you can continue to do so.

Problem being, things today are indicating what is happening is not for the good of employees, but for the good of employers. Which brings with it a whole other slew of issues which disenfranchises the worker class. Which historically is a really bad idea if one's goal is to maintain a peaceful, functional society.

It's why the question of "should X be able to make a livable wage" is one which has to be answered very carefully, as this question is slowly slipping into the territory of "should people who spend most their lives doing what others want be able to afford living". That's how revolutions start.

> In other words, should a summer job for a teenager pay a livable wage?

Yes. Many teenagers of working age are head of household and shouldn’t have their wages undercut by the dependent children of others.

> I don't see why working multiple jobs, each of which takes a part of the day, should be considered bad

Because it makes life unnecessarily stressful. Transportation costs, typically borne by the worker, increase dramatically. It’s more efficient to work a single job, if possible.

If you want a 17 year-old lifeguard in San Francisco to be able to afford a mortgage San Francisco, you end up with no pools in San Francisco and unemployed teens.

It may be hard to believe, especially for the typical Californian, but there are other kinds of housing than single-family homes. It wasn’t so long ago that a single 17-year-old making minimum wage could afford to house themselves outside of a family unit.

I believe it. I think zoning and building codes are most of the problem. Allow 200 sqft apartments like you find in NYC and you will see a stark reduction in the working homeless.

But aren't 200 sq ft apartments banned because they are unlivably small? The guys who enacted that should take a look at Tokyo and Seoul, and maybe actually listen to the reasons of people who rent tiny apartments there.

They are objectively livable in a literal sense. But, yes I agree that some policy makers decided that they would rather have people homeless than in unpleasant living accommodations.

Studio apartments of that size (sometimes even smaller) are bought by university students in Norway all the time, sometimes for as much as $200.000. They can be quite comfortable.

Not sure how they’d be priced in SF, but to my intuition that seems out of working homelesss range. In cheaper cities though, definitely.

These places are illegal to offer in sf. There is a minimum allowance for size