I feel like “maybe give up on the idea of owning a home” is missing a bit of the forest for the trees when even not owning your own home is largely out of reach for most people these days. Despite the cheaper rent on the Not-Seattle side of Washington and the fact that Washington’s minimum wage is about $10/hr as of this year (it’s indexed to inflation), I’d have a hard time affording a 2 bedroom apartment on that amount of income, even working full-time (which no one would let me do).
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The housing market is just insane. In a Major city household income of 200K+ still leaves a two bedroom apartment rental as a dubious fincial decision.
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I meant it more in terms of trade-offs. If one prefers living in a big city then one might have to choose to be a life-long renter. There’s no shame in this, but it does run up against the concept of the “American Dream” (which, as you imply, has itself finally been running up against the realities of late-stage capitalism for at least a decade).
Otherwise, yes, as the map indicates it’s very difficult for single-income households making local minimum wage to even rent a 2-bedroom apartment that is inside or a 1.5-hr commute from an urban centre.
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It sounds like you drank the kool aid and have been duped in to thinking that a person should not be paid a wage on which they can survive. That’s just marketing rhetoric from the wealthy and it worked quite well on you. Ask yourself how you might justify paying someone so little that they are forced to choose between shelter and food with medicine not even being an option.
In 1968 a minimum wage worker could afford a decent home on a 30 year mortgage and a new car every 5 years. But that’s not really the point. The point is that we are allowing people to be paid less than a living wage. We have a word for that. It’s called wage slavery and it’s immoral. It’s a practice so low, that the southern states used it as a justification for chattel slavery comparing the life of a chattel slave favorably to a wage slave. Further, the practice is economically unsound as it transfers wealth to the people at the top. All one need do is look at the life of the average American worker before the anti union movements of the 70’s and 80’s to see how the reduction in collective bargaining power has caused imbalance and a stagnation in wages resulting in a nation with most of its people being one paycheck away from homelessness.
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The system is set up to keep common people “working poor.”
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I’m not saying it shouldn’t be possible, I’m just saying that it’s very rare to see this in any economy other than “Baby Boomer America” in the 50s-70s.
Most other countries have their kids stay at home until they’re established in their careers, or just have multi-generational households, or people have roommates, or a long-ass commute (by public transport, because most other countries can’t afford cars for everyone), or some varying combination of the above.
Don’t be suckered by the mythology of the American Dream, the whole “prosperity” era was basically just the wealthy throwing bones to the working class because they were shit-scared that Communism would come to America and Western Europe in the post-WWII era, and that was done via the Bretton Woods agreement, which essentially siphoned money out of 3rd world countries to enrich 1st world ones, and gave the US control over international exchange rates, which propped up the US middle class by artificially forcing our manufacturing and resource extraction sectors into profitability.
Once that was removed in ~1972, we see wages almost immediately begin to stagnate in America, because the rich stopped sharing and started sucking the money out of the working class, and because the 3rd world nations finally started catching up and competing with us. A few decades of recovery later, and now India and China (not to mention automation) are just chewing away at jobs, and the correction of wealth in the US middle class is fucking us up politically, because we didn’t reinvest all that money in infrastructure, education, and staying ahead of the rest of the world in efficiency and productivity. Instead we just became a massive piggy bank for our own ultra-wealthy citizens to break open and loot.
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But that’s the point. More and more, the jobs (much less, the “good” jobs) are in cities. Even with very low unemployment, jobs are more and more skewed to cities, not towns and rural areas. Moreover, what this data also indicates is that one job doesn’t cut it. For an individual worker, they can’t afford to have one full-time job. They have to have 2 or even 3 jobs to afford to live. They can’t drive or ride the bus or train for hours between jobs. They need to live in a place where jobs are concentrated in a dense area, with public transportation or good infrastructure. AKA, cities. A two-earner scenario is basically the same. If a couple with kids want to actually be able to afford to live, they both need jobs, sometimes multiple jobs. Same deal - this requires cities.
And cities need people. One of the biggest problems with areas like NYC, Chicago, SF Bay is that those cities need people who do work of all levels, but people who earn minimum wage can’t afford to live anywhere near them.
There are two solutions, and they complement each other: pay living wages and make sure there is affordable housing.
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When has this not been true? It’s always sucked to not be in the top 20%, anywhere, ever. I have to say I appreciate that the bottom 10-20 percent are no longer enslaved literally.
Could you try to pin something uniquely US to the US? Not just hold us out as the one group in the world that shouldn’t be that way, and should be held responsible for people being people, and life sucking for most of us most of the time? It’s more work, sorry.
This is the case here as well, media imagery since the 1950s aside. Multigenerational households are normal, unless you’re in advertising, in which case they’re awful unprofitable and to be done away with. I suspect many in the top 20% feel the urge to strike out and form a solidly individualistic household, but that’s what they were told was normal (despite it being brand new to the world) by their car dealers, and white goods salespeople, and their realtors.
We had also just trained millions of american men in combat. You don’t want that group to get grouchy. But their kids? No promises were made to their kids, who are no threat.
Problem with your question is… the bottom decile moves when we choose to mandate that everyone can have a basic subsistance income. Not the same people in that decile anymore.
The money has OUR name on it, not any one of our names above the others, all deciles aside.
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Well that’s the canard, isn’t it? It’s not just about “personal responsibility”; it’s also about pervasive institutional mechanisms that create different outcomes for different groups of people. If you’re poor and you fuck up, you’re fucked. If you’re rich and you fuck up, there are many ways in which mechanisms created by others (but others like you) effectively give you a mulligan.
And while it’s laudable that you packed up and left the big city in search of a lower cost of living, (1) it’s very difficult to physically move from a place, especially if you don’t have wealth, and (2) your industry is one that allows remote work, so you can effectively hold down a “big city” job in a small town.
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Good for you. I don’t know how young ones starting out or working class people do it here.
My wife and I have lived here since before the turn of the 21th century and before that I was able to bring a little equity from my condo I sold in San Jose after divorcing my first wife.
We both kind of came here restarting lives and have done pretty well. But the downward pressure on much of labor force has been tremendous. Even cops and firefighters can’t afford to live in the city, especially if they’ve got families. We’re childless, but if we weren’t, it would be tougher.
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I too would find paying $2,500 for a mortgage (let’s say $3,000 with PITI, hell, let’s say $3,500) to be an unbearable burden as I rake in over $16,000/month.
Why, every day I’d stare in dumb shock at my finances, and tears of shame would run down my cheeks as I sobbed and was forced to put off more than $5,000 in cocaine again, after paying for groceries, utilities, the Truck and the Maserati.
The horror! The horror! But… But never fear. If I just vote Republican one more time, they’ll surely lower my taxes and give me my one true love again.
Oh the shame! But it’s all right, I have a platinum credit rating. I can put those things on plastic and life will be good again for one more month. I deserve this. I am American.
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These types of discussions remind me of a tone-deaf comment made by the former president of the American Bar Association in the early 2010s. He dismissed the idea that law school was expensive with the anecdote that he sold his car to pay for his first year of law school. Of course, that was back in the '70s. He was correctly criticized for being supremely out of touch with a world where a year of law school now costs $30,000 or more.
Statements like “I make X but I can nevertheless afford Y” distill themselves into, “I hear what you’re saying, but my experience is different from yours; therefore, either your perception of your own experience is wrong, or you’re lying, or you’re just incompetent.”
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And what changed from then to now? Collective bargaining aka unions. That’s what. Oh, and as for the “in other countries” rhetoric, people with a job can afford a roof over their head. All other “they do this” and “they do that” isn’t in any way germain. As for the “throwing a bone/fear of communism” rhetoric, how do you explain people with a job being able to afford a home before 1900?
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This is a good point. The point of minimum wage is to ensure that people are being paid a wage that they can survive on even though the market wouldn’t normally pay them that. So, what does “survive at” mean? Does it include the median price of a 2 bedroom apartment in the county they work in? Maybe. But, maybe it means the 25th percentile price of a 1 bedroom place within a 1 hour public transportation commute from work. I suspect that even that is unaffordable at minimum wage in most places.
I think the bigger issue here isn’t that wages are too low, but rather housing is too high. Poor transportation networks limit where you can live and still commute to work. Zoning and anti-development laws prevent increasing housing supply in those areas. We need to invest in transportation and high density development within cities.
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I didn’t know Old Economy Steve ran the ABA:
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It’s not so much the “family size” thing, but my question is how do they calculate the “market price.” My guess is that “market price” is based on median rent for two bedroom apartments. And yes, there is little reason to assume that somebody making the MINIMUM wage can afford a median rent. But the problem is that they would have a difficult time affording the lowest quintile rent for a two bedroom apartment in most markets.
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I love these charts. LOVE THEM!
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I am so relieved i am no longer making minimum wage. I recall making something like $8.75 working customer service, i would make a misery and could barely cover my living expenses. My heart goes to anyone still struggling to make ends meet 
especially if they have a family.
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That was back when:
- Organized labor ensured that blue collar work paid living wages
- When those running corporations had to rely on productivity and growth for their job incentives instead of stock prices.
- When securities markets were heavily regulated to avoid fraud and overt manipulation
- When predatory lending wasn’t causing housing and college tuition prices to skyrocket far in excess of real value.
- The average middle class family did not have to take on debt loads of 30%+ of their income on average to attain decent housing and education.
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