[imgabe]

> why should literally anyone be unable to afford housing?

Because it costs money? It takes time and effort from other humans to create and they need to be compensated for that? Anything that costs any amount of money will have someone that is unable to afford it. The article is not even talking about being able to afford any housing, they are talking about 2-bedroom apartments. There are smaller apartments. There are rooms in shared houses. There are other forms of housing.

Again, we're talking about the majority of the people earning minimum wage probably not depending on the job to pay for their housing. Maybe they are getting something else out of it. It's cool with you to eliminate a lot of their jobs by raising the minimum wage?

If the problem is some people can't afford housing, we can fix that by providing housing vouchers to those people, or changing zoning laws so more housing can be built to bring down the price, or nationalize the housing industry and just have the government build housing for everyone and we all get assigned a government issue apartment to live in, comrade.

Either way, we address the problem of housing by dealing with housing, not by manipulating the labor market which is only tangentially related to housing.

[mlevental]

>Because it costs money?

the question was "should" not can't. your answer is therefore normative rather than descriptive. let's agree to disagree that market forces shouldn't interfere with people's abilities to survive (healthcare, housing, justice system).

>Maybe they are getting something else out of it. It's cool with you to eliminate a lot of their jobs by raising the minimum wage?

you wrongly believe that raising the minimum wage will lead to mass lay offs. ny raised minimum wage in 2016 and 2018 and the only sector that cut jobs was food service.

> we can fix that by providing housing vouchers to those people, or changing zoning laws so more housing can be built to bring down the price, or nationalize the housing industry and just have the government build housing for everyone and we all get assigned a government issue apartment to live in, comrade

facetious nonsense. not a single one of those things is a current policy practice (section 8 is not a housing voucher).

>Either way, we address the problem of housing by dealing with housing, not by manipulating the labor market which is only tangentially related to housing.

like i told the other guy: go ahead and build housing at cost. until then i'll vote for minimum wage increases.

[imgabe]

> let's agree to disagree that market forces shouldn't interfere with people's abilities to survive (healthcare, housing, justice system).

Fair enough. I mean, market forces do interfere with people's ability to survive whether we care to agree with it or not, at least until we can develop a post-scarcity economy.

[mlevental]

again you're missing a key normative word: should. i said should. i'm well aware that they do. i don't think they should. like i keep saying - which is why i will vote always vote for minimum wage increases.

[imgabe]

What I'm saying is, raising the minimum wage does not make market forces go away. It just changes the input to those forces. Look at San Francisco. Even people who earn far, far above minimum wage have a hard time affording housing there. The existence of high incomes didn't magically make market forces go away.

The only way a market goes away is if the supply of something is so high that it is effectively worthless, because everyone can freely access all they could ever want. For instance, there is no market for breathable air. We can all breathe as much air as we want without impacting the ability of anyone else to do so. Hence, there is no reason for anyone to try to sell air to anyone else (for now, anyway...).

[mlevental]

i'm not clueless - i'm very familiar with supply/demand economics. my point is simply that saying we should raise housing supply is very convenient when none of us are real estate developers (and the developers aren't saying that). are you going to quit your job and start developing real estate at cost? no. am i? no. are the policy makers going to do it? no. so it's a completely feckless remark (increase housing supply).

my ultimate point is therefore that you have almost no other policy levers than the minimum wage.