This is problem with basing wages on an individual needs, in reality the wage you are paid should have, and does have nothing to do with the amount of money you "need" to support yourself.
it is just a arbitrary wage picked by legislatures exactly like a "minimum wage" law only the "living wage" seems to apply to older people, where "minimum wage" laws apply to everyone. For example a 20yo in the UK can make "minimum wage" but a 24yo will need to make "living wage" both of which are just numbers pulled out of thin air, not connected to "the amount of money you need to support yourself. "
The living wage is not in the UK. Dispute the method all you want of course, but there is a method:
Yes, it gets complicated, but “$7.25/hr isn’t enough” is not complicated.
Not everything needs a government mandate. Every drive thru, and service job I see is has $13, $15, $16 per hour wages, and this is in the midwest where the median income is hovering around 50-55K
San Francisco can be a playground for the rich until they get sick of paying for $30 lattes or whatever and flee to low cost locales like Manhattan that have affordable housing and transit.
It won’t be “fixed” until we’re backed into an economic corner where it becomes politically acceptable for the property owners to lose bazillions of dollars.
I don't know how you got to that, other than by assuming that nice areas have to be expensive. The fact that SF is unable to achieve both is an indicator of broken local markets and politics, not an ironclad rule for every other locality.
Edit: Another framing is that "nice" and "fancy" are different things, as much as extremely unequal markets like SF distort the distinction.
This is generally the case. I can’t think of a single counter example.
Most of the US satisfies these constraints, especially if you own and don't mind driving a car.
That's factually untrue and kind of an absurd statement. Of course people live in Manhattan working as servers.
The idea that a job shouldn't exist if it is only something that would interest a high-school student or uneducated young adult who is willing to live with lots of roommates creates fewer opportunities at the low end--not more.
One sensible metric is that you should be able to support yourself while living in the area you work (or an area nearby such that it isn't a significant financial hardship or timesink to commute to work). Service jobs largely fail on that metric, effectively using government money and family support structures to cover the gap.