[thunderbird120]

This is the actual source of the article[1]. The methodology does not support the claim the title makes.

>LendingTree used U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Census Bureau data to determine whether owning or renting a home is affordable to a person working a full-time minimum wage job. Assuming a person could afford to spend up to 30% of their gross monthly income on housing, LendingTree calculated how much in monthly housing costs a person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at an hourly wage equivalent to their state’s minimum wage could afford. Researchers then compared that figure to the median monthly homeowner costs for homes with a mortgage and the median monthly gross rent payment in each state.

So, to recap. This study assumes you must spend less than 30% of your income on housing and assumes that all housing costs the median homeowner/rent payment. These are both independently terrible assumptions but combined you get total nonsense. People earning in the bottom 5 percentiles of the income distribution do not rent places that charge 50th percentile rent. They also are not arbitrarily constrained to follow good budgeting guidelines which specify not more than 30% of income to housing. I know this because according to this methodology, the arrangement which I very comfortably made it through grad school in is apparently not possible.

[1]https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/minimum-wage-worke...

[zpeti]

The title doesn’t make sense at all to me. If the statement was literally true, what would happen to the millions of minimum wage earners? They literally couldn’t afford rent and would be literally living on the street, or in shelters.

And I’m using the word literally literally.

You can make a case for some sort of relative poverty where they find hardship in renting which is absolutely true, but this clickbait title is just bullshit.

Unaffordable means you cannot pay. It doesn’t mean it’s hard to get by.

[II2II]

> Unaffordable means you cannot pay. It doesn’t mean it’s hard to get by.

That statement does not make sense in the case of housing. For most people, housing is their top priority. Not only is shelter a necessity in the survivalist sense, but there are cascading consequences for those who don't have housing. This ranges from it being extraordinarily difficult to secure and maintain employment to driving up the cost for other necessities such as food and clothing.

Put in other terms: if you have the choice between food and housing, your money goes towards housing. Technically speaking, food is more important since it is literally impossible to survive without it. Realistically speaking, food is still available from other sources (e.g. food banks). While there is a loss of dignity, there are fewer cascading consequences.

Even if a person can pay for their housing, I would argue that the word unaffordable still applies when they have to accept handouts for other necessities. I would also go a step further and suggest the unaffordable label applies when it impacts any socially imposed expense that will contribute to a downwards spiral that can lead to homelessness.

[roenxi]

Furthermore, since this article seems to be in support of raising the minimum wage, if there is literally no place to rent then raising the minimum wage doesn't do much. There is literally-literally no marginal housing stock available to rent.

It is like if a merchant has 4 saucepans and 5 people who want to buy a saucepan. It doesn't matter how much money the people have. They cannot all get a saucepan. The housing market is much more complicated by but $15/hr isn't going to fix that sort of problem; if it exists. Where would the extra housing stock for the workers come form?

[ChrisLTD]

Perhaps the title is using the colloquial definition of “unaffordable” rather than the literal? Colloquially, “unaffordable” often means it’s hard to pay for something, not that’s it’s impossible to pay for something.

[dilap]

They live with roomates or they live in vehicles. In the bay area there are tons of beat-up old vans and RVs with people living in them all over the place.

[bryanrasmussen]

>They also are not arbitrarily constrained to follow good budgeting guidelines which specify not more than 30% of income to housing.

poor people are not arbitrarily constrained to spend only 30% of their income for housing? Well that's true I guess, but I mean there's a reason why 30% is assumed as being good budgeting practice.

>the arrangement which I very comfortably made it through grad school in is apparently not possible.

yes, I think the arrangement I made it through on grad school would not be possible now that I am adult with a family. but sure if the conditions that held true for me then, age, no dependents, stayed true for all my life I could live as a poor person and only be a little bit desperate at times.

hey, did you ever like have a bad patch in grad school but think it's ok this is only for a few more years?

[bojangleslover]

>I am an adult with a family

Minimum wage is not meant to support a family

[Volundr]

"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." - Franklin Roosevelt 1933

Personally I including having a family in a "decent living", and given the standards of the 1930s where women were generally expected to be homemakers I doubt Roosevelt intended this quote to suggest two working parents.

I realize that a segment of the population has been working to redefine the minimum wage and what it's for, telling us that it's for teenagers who don't need a living wage, but let's be clear: at it's inception minimum wage was supposed to provide a family a comfortable living.

[danaris]

Bullshit.

If that were true, it would be legally specified as "the minimum wage you can pay to someone without a family."

Minimum wage was always intended to be a living wage. It just hasn't kept pace with inflation for the last several decades.

There is absolutely nothing that makes it harder to pay someone with a family minimum wage, or easier for someone with a family to get a job with a better wage.

[bojangleslover]

That's because having a family is a choice, plain and simple, and this would incentivize having more kids to get paid more.

[bryanrasmussen]

also people who have families will never lose jobs and have to take minimum wage jobs, or condoms fail, or anything else inconvenient, so everybody better plan their lives well, because good planning keeps accidents from happening. Just look at any software development project!

[tomxor]

> This study assumes you must spend less than 30% of your income on housing

I'm not saying the study is good, but the lower the wage, the smaller the percentage of income remaining to spend on rent, because of basic cost of living, after a certain threshold all flexibility with income dissappears and cost of living dictates rent.

For high earners the cost of living is a small dent against their income, so percentage of income to spend on renting is a desicion about savings - this is not true of the lowest earners, it's a choice of eating.

[bombcar]

Yeah see my comment - this is basically useless without additional data. Minimum to median is a big flag.

[pydry]

>This study assumes you must spend less than 30% of your income on housing

As long as I can remember a reasonable budget has been assumed to be 1/3 on housing, 1/3 on living expenses and 1/3 on savings.

I never really saw that as unreasonable. Are there people who think it's reasonable for an average household budget to be 40% living expenses and 60% housing?

[tazjin]

The 1/3 figure is from a different time. For people who don't have tech (or equivalent) income I think it's frequently closer to 50%, of course depending a lot on location, too.

[nostrebored]

An average household budget doesn't have a single earner. When you're broke, you have roommates. In more expensive places, until you find a partner to live with you often have roommates.

This isn't a bad thing.

[ChrisLTD]

The point is, these people shouldn’t be broke. After all, they have full-time work.

[nostrebored]

Broke is an expression here. I've lived in places where people are truly impoverished and I've lived in US cities with low minimum wage.

The difference is massive.

The fotm is life is better for poor people in the US now than it was even 50 years ago.

[hh3k0]

> This isn't a bad thing.

Counterpoint: It absolutely is.

[danaris]

The way our society is set up right now, it is.

Our society right now is an outlier. Throughout most of history, people lived much more communally than we do now, and there is good reason to be trying to move back toward that; however, that's a pretty major shift, and it's not going to happen overnight. It's also probably outside of the scope of this discussion.

[spicybright]

Why?

[iamstupidsimple]

Sometimes you're forced to live with some truly awful people. It's not always practical to stay with family, e.g. many people moving to the city for work.

[brailsafe]

I had the same thought. It's a reasonable choice for a definition of "to afford rent". Ya you can spend all of your money on rent, but then you'll have nothing left.

[kevinventullo]

The article is not talking about average household budgets, it is talking about minimum wage.