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Flyover towns certainly have $10/h jobs. Amazon pays $15/h and it's in plenty of flyover towns. If you live in a bubble where you think flyover towns somehow don't have $10/h jobs you need to get out of the Bay. They don't have high paying 6-figure salaried jobs, though.

The people in places where living expenses are high are getting $18 minimum and often times $22-25/h. The $15 "living wage" myth is garbage because HCoL areas already have higher wages and LCoL areas aren't that expensive that you couldn't live on $10/h. If you raise the minimum you won't change the shitty living situation in HCoL areas and you'll just drive closures and automation in LCoL areas. Source: Bay Area restaurant job listings

> The idea you're going to cut rent prices by a factor of 5 is about as detached from reality as it's possible to get.

I never said you'd be able to cut rent prices by 5x, merely that doing so would alleviate basically every concern about a "living wage". I know that West Coast NIMBYism would never let the level of density needed to achieve that happen. In China you can get an apartment for <3k RMB/mo even in a city like Shanghai, but in China the government can tell you to GTFO and bulldoze your apartment and replace it with skyscrapers which would never happen in the U.S. If you just tore down anything in SF under 10 floors and replaced it with 40 floor towers you'd instantly increase density by 20x.