This site has these sorts of stats for each state.
I agree with the sentiment. There’s a large gap between minimum wage and housing. I don’t think anybody expects to afford an ultra luxurious three-story corner penthouse loft from working full time at Taco Bell, but I do think it’s reasonable to expect to be able to afford a simple, safe, one-bedroom in good repair.
I own so I’m completely out of touch with rent prices. I know what they were when I was renting 10+ years ago but things are a lot different now. I went on apartments.com to see if I could prove this study wrong.
TL/DR: I could, but … not really.
My criteria was: (1) under $1002 / month, (2) in a safe area, (3) with free parking, (4) within a 10-minute drive of at least two supermarkets, and (5) within a 20-minute drive of most of our metro area. I found multiple apartment complexes that met all those criteria, along with multiple independent rentals. All of the complexes were within the $900 - $1000 range. So … yes, technically I just proved the survey wrong. But that $100 savings doesn’t really exist.
First, you need a car to get from there to here. That’s non negotiable. Our mass transit here sucks and you’re either going to be two hours early or 15 minutes late, and that’s assuming you have a regular, consistent schedule to work with. So let’s assume you buy a sensible 10-year-old Civic / Corolla / whatever with 90k miles in immaculate condition. I found a few options nearby for $12k, and let’s assume you talk the dealer down another $2k, you have a $2500 downpayment, and there’s no tax because we’re in magical la-la land. Let’s also assume you got zero percent interest because it’s 2003 again for some reason. A 60-month loan would be $125, or an additional 4 hours a week.
Next, let’s talk groceries. Let’s say you are exceptionally frugal and can prepare nutritious, filling meals for yourself with only a $200 / month grocery spend. That’s an extra 7 hours of work per week.
Next, gotta put gas in that car. Your friend, who happens to a magical elf, magically conjures up gasoline just for you for the low, low price of $2 / gallon. Wow! Combined with your extremely thrifty vehicle (and your commute, which also just happens to be entirely on interstate at 40 MPG), you only go through 10 gallons of fuel a week. At $80 / month, that’s an extra 3 hours of work per week.
Don’t forget car insurance! Your driving record is spotless, your FICO score makes TransUnion weep like that statute of liberty from The Onion’s political cartoons, and your driving is angelic. Your full-coverage premium (because you don’t want to get hit with surprise bills) is only $75 per month. You pay in full to avoid fees, so that’s another two hours of work each week.
Did I mention car maintenance? You do all your own oil changes, filter changes, tire rotation, everything, because you’re a frugal bastard. I don’t even know what oil costs because I’m fortunate enough to be able to pay people to do that for me, so just for the sake of making things easy, let’s say
one bananaten dollars per week. Heck, let’s just round that down an hour of work per week.Oh and let’s make utilities super simple. That apartment includes water, sewer, trash, cable, and internet. You only have to pay electric and gas. And because it’s exceptionally well insulated and you’re very frugal with your electricity, your combined electric and gas bill is only $75 / month, averaged year round. That’s only two hours of work per week.
You use an MVNO to save a fortune, and your phone is only $20 / month. That’s a half hour of work per week.
And I know it’s exorbitant, but you have the audacity to want to go out once in a while. You splurge by getting the dollar menu at McDonald’s (which doesn’t exist anymore BTW) so you budget an extra $30 / month on “fun money”. That’s an extra hour a week.
So with those extremely unrealistic and lowball numbers, you’re looking at an additional 20-ish hours of work each week. To afford that barebones and frankly impossible lifestyle, you’re looking at working 125 hours a week. That’s 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with no downtime ever. And again, I’m using impossibly low numbers here and making a lot of assumptions that will never happen.
That’s before taxes. That assumes you never get sick. You never splurge on luxuries like “plates” or “clothing”. Your car lasts forever. You’re never a victim of crime. Your rent never increases. Inflation never happens. And you never take time to go on interviews for a better paying job.
So yeah, I technically proved the study wrong, but not in any remotely good way.
It’s late, so I could be making dumb mistakes here, but I think the numbers are at least loosely factoring in those sort of expenses. It’s not 100 hours/week just to cover rent, it’s 100 hours/week to actually maybe afford that rent.
$7.25/hour x 40 hours/week x 4 weeks/month = $1160/month gross income
Assuming a maximum of 1/3 of gross income goes to housing, that’s $383/month available for rent. The site calculates $377/month as “affordable rent” for the minimum wage worker, so for the sake of the argument, I think my calculations are close enough.
So, that means for every hour worked, about $2.39 is going towards rent ($7.25x0.33).
$2.39/hour x 106 hours/week x 4 weeks/month = $1013, which is just over their “1-Bedroom Fair Market Rent” rate of $1002/month.Pretty sure they are using 56/12=4.667 weeks per month and 0.3 ratio instead of a third, that makes the numbers line up for me
Yeah, my numbers were definitely very round, but if we are trying to get more exact, aren’t there only 52 weeks per year, so 4.33 weeks per month?
Typo, 52 is what I meant. Good catch!
You did not prove the study wrong. The study looked at average rents across the state. Finding a cheap apartment in Lewisburg is not the same as finding something in Lower Merion.
Did you actually read my reply?
Yes, you started and ended by saying you have technically proven the study wrong. In the middle, you pulled some sample numbers from various sources and agreed with the general premise that the cost of living is too damn high. But then you went back to claiming to have technically disproven the study. Which you didn’t, not in any sense.
I did, in fact disprove the study. I found an apartment for under the claimed amount. I then went on to explain exactly why that doesn’t matter.
Context is king.
Right, that doesn’t disprove the study, though.
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On average. You demonstrated it is possible somewhere in Pennsylvania. That’s not even close to the same thing.
If you can’t afford basic necessities on minimum wage, the wage is too low and the job doesn’t deserve to exist IMO.
Especially when so many of the largest companies are profitable and making more and more money. This system is unsustainable. It also causes societal unrest which leads to extremism. I don’t understand the mindset behind it, the increasing polarization as things get more and more unaffordable seems to support the theory.
Nonsense, you just need to pull harder on those bootstraps. Pull 'em all the way to the moon.
Pull until you get The Wedgie of Wealth, then pull some more!
Lol
You’re right. I would love to see legislation that ties the minimum wage to cost of living.
That was the whole fucking point of minimum wage in the first place, but somewhere between Nixon and Reagan we collectively forgot what government was for and now half of America Is like ‘Spank me harder, daddy’ every four years and I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.
Right?
So many “conservatives” these days seem to really only have the political position of “I’ll be fucked if I’ll stand for the possibility of anyone, anywhere having their situation improved unless my own situation is improved even more in the process. I would rather burn this fucker to the ground, with me in it, than see someone else get any kind of aid or relief that I’m not getting, even if I don’t need it or want it anyway.”
And have it go area by area. I don’t need an obscene amount to live here in Appalachia. A living wage for me would be a poverty wage for someone from California.
It would probably require too much thought for folks in power.
What qualifies as “basic necessities”?
I’m not sure minimum wage has ever been enough for most people to afford an apartment on their own.
Certainly in the early 90s, even in a low cost of living area, I was working 2 jobs (one part time but a bit over minimum wage) in order to share a 500sqft, 1br apartment with a friend.
And part of the problem with trying to set a level of basic necessities (or a ‘living wage’) is that you have to account for a TON of external factors.
For example, nobody is building affordable, reasonably sized apartments or houses any more. They only want to build 2000sqft+ houses, or 1000+sqft apartments with all the trimmings and amenities. That certainly raises the cost of living.
By way of comparison, my grandparents raised 3 kids in a 998sqft 2-story duplex. It’s wasn’t large but it was a good family neighborhood with a park across the street. And they had 1 smallish (for the era) car. So why does everyone need a bajillion square feet and 2 cars, including a massive SUV to raise their 1 or 2 kids these days? (2 cars I get with both parents working these days, but the trucks and SUVs I see many low income families driving is ridiculous).
And is it fair for the minimum wage to have to be set to a rate that subsidizes the builders who choose to only build that bigger, more expensive housing.
We definitely need changes in the way this is all handled, but it’s not a simple thing. To truly solve the issue will require significant changes in our social structure and philosophy.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. 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.
Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe. It is greatly to their interest to do this because decent living, widely spread among our 125, 000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known. It is the only way to utilize the so-called excess capacity of our industrial plants. This is the principle that makes this one of the most important laws that ever has come from Congress because, before the passage of this Act, no such industrial covenant was possible.
Franklin Roosevelt, on the creation of a minimum wage.
Today’s right-wing US-americans would call this communism, if they could read
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Food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, utilities, and some money for travel and entertainment.
Plus the ability to get financing or financial aid to pay for education and training, but those can be paid for by the government or an employer.
damn, and that’s just the rent, not even factoring in food and clothing. wow.
No, they did factor in food and clothing. See QualifiedKitten’s response in the comments.
Pull up those fucking bootstraps! /s
You guys got straps?!?
You were given free boots?!?
How many people are working for minimum wage in Pennsylvania?
Almost no one. Either they pay you just a little over minimum or well under the minimum
I don’t know exactly. That site says 437,146 people make below $30k/yr, whereas $7.25 works out to about $15k/yr.
Lmao Pennsylvania is rough. Jawn is worse the further in the sticks you are. 2.1k in my town for a two bedroom.
Meanwhile, Puerto Rico looking pretty sane. What’s the catch? There’s always a catch.
I mean, I guess there’s hurricanes
But the president will come throw paper towels at you afterwards, so no worries.
Job market.
There isn’t always a catch. Governance is often based on compromise and corruption runs rampant, so often there will be shitty things thrown in to appease corporate donors and conservative politicians, but sometimes the government just does something good without also doing something bad.
I haven’t looked at other places in a while since I am content where I am. Just looked up my options if I were to move out and YIKES! I knew it was bad but not this bad.
Ban zoning and let the free market over build. Start a government construction office to build housing awarding apartments on a lottery+income level system.
Either way would work and if your local political leadership is not talking about this it is time to vote the bum out.
Nah just legalize public housing. Tent cities are cool
Tent cities are not cool. Sanitation and fire codes are important.
i know bro but they are still cool
No they freaken aren’t. I have been to slums in the developing world and there isn’t a single person in any of them that wouldn’t stab you in the neck if they could have your privileged life. And I don’t blame them. Hey you know what is really cool? Not having to rent out your daughters for food and being able to walk without stepping in piles of human shit.
We are done btw. Go ahead and praise grinding poverty on the internet to someone else.
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This is why we have roommates when we’re young and dumb.
Eight years ago I could afford a one bedroom apartment by not having a car. That is not possible anymore. My $650 bachelor pad is now $1400 and wages have only slightly gone up. There’s now a generational divide between people in their late 20s and early 20s.
Remember Americas prison population issues. That follows people their entire lives, and getting decent work becomes a major problem.
I’m sure another 40 years of Democrats and Republicans will fix it.
After all, they’ve done a pretty good job so far.
Dont start that “both sides are the same” shit.
Both sides are not the same. However, both sides are terrible. One just more so than the other.
Exactly. One side openly embraces fascism, while the other side actively fights progressive voices. If there’s one thing I hate about voting Democrat, it’s that every time progressives try to actually get power, and try to do something positive, for real people, the Establishment members of the party just drown them out with more money.
Centrist democrats love to guilt and shame progressives any time progressives try to leverage their support in order to get anything they want.
Even if it’s just the slightest shift or adjustment, the center left seems to always go right to “oh so you’d rather the Republicans win if you can’t get your way? This is bigger than you. You need to put your selfish wants aside and just support the things we want. Maybe after we get all the things we want and have all the power, maybe then we can consider some of your priorities, but until then, we’re entitled to all your votes and support simply by virtue of being slightly less opposed to you than the conservatives”.
Would be cool if the worst of those two consistently lost, so they would have to change things around.
No they’re saying that the two party system ensures that you guys can never change anything.
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The minimum wage has been seven bucks since 2008.
That seems pretty ‘both sides are the same’ to me.
Federally. Which states have higher? I’ll give you one guess
Yeah, this is the usual argument.
The whole point of a federal government is so that states don’t have the ability to rob people of their labor, but since Democrats don’t do their job when they have power, there are tens of millions of Americans who are.
And I’m not willing to make excuses for them.
Lol they literally do the job when they have power… The states prove that. Whatever dummy, bye
So why do we have thousands of people living on the streets in my state that’s been solidly blue for over 40 years? Take your blinders off already because you are engaging in the same behavior as MAGA supporters: blind allegiance.
We have out of control housing costs. Nothing, including this, will be solved with divided federal govt (one party currently controlled by deranged, fascist cult). Those homeless know they’re safer in certain areas, and many more are literally shipped there by R’s (that’s their “solution” by the way).
There will always be problems to fix, but at least I can count on D’s to be mostly reasonable and rational, and do their fucking jobs and solve the problems (eventually, even with massive R obstruction).
Since when does minimum wage fix mental illness?
Sure Democrats aren’t good but if you think they are remotely as bad as Republicans… I’m sorry, you’re just really, REALLY fucking stupid if you think that.
God this really sounds like the kind of talk that spouses of abusers use.
Like I get it. I really do understand there is worse but like “yeah but he doesn’t leave me bleeding on the floor and usually tells me why it was my fault he had to hit me and then bandages me up!” Makes anyone sane agasp in horror.
It’s a shitty take to support an abuser because they could be worse. Even though I get it when stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Edit: just because you are used to your own brand of abuse doesn’t mean the other side doesn’t see it. And even if they have normalized a worse abuser doesn’t mean it goes away when you try to hold moral high ground.
It gets better by trying to prove to be better. Not just different. I’m an easy face to punch at because I’m just calling out why you being angry that people won’t agree with you won’t help make them agree with you any more.
One is trying to kill you. One just wants your wallet.
It’s not my fault if you’re so stupid that you end up bleeding out on the floor. Do not take the rest of us with you because you are too stupid to see one has worse intent.
No one with their head on straight is happy to vote for a Democrat, but if you want the clown with a knife that will shank you over the businessman who wants to short your 401k, then have fun bleeding out on the floor.
You should consider going back to college. Or just going to college. Or just reading a single book.
Ah I see. It’s the democrats fault that deep republican states take advantage of their citizens. It was the Dems all along!
/s. It’s depressing that people actually think this way.
