[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.