Do you have something filtering out downvoted comments? Cause it appears to me that there would have been two comments not deeply in the negative when you posted. The other top level comments have 50+ downvotes and every other comment is a reply to them.
You hear that? That’s inflation jumping back up to like 10% all thanks to this bullshit.
Get yourself a marketable skill. Flipping a burger ain’t it.
Why should anyone bust their ass learning a skill like welding or going to school for information technology or becoming a dental assistant or becoming an electrician when burger flippers will only be making a few dollars an hour less? Where is the incentive to better yourself, learn and get a better job?
This is such a mess that Lemmings are going to love it! LOL
If someone is content with flipping burgers their entire life they should be able to survive on the wages they’re paid. “Burger flippers” are still essential to the operation of the country. The service industry is a vital part of American culture, and if you want to maintain it then paying people to do the jobs you don’t want to is the only way.
Your problem should be with other professions not paying more, not that other people are finally making enough money to survive.
People SHOULDN’T be content with being just a skill less burger flipper. That’s the damn point. Go get a goddamn skill. Be the manager at a burger joint. Own a burger joint. You move up in the world by learning a skill and getting a better job.
What do you think will happen when those other professions now (rightfully so) demand more money?? You think some unicorn magic is going to keep prices down? No. Those workers with actual skills and actual degrees will make more money and companies will counter that by tacking on another 10 or 20% to their prices. So what did you just accomplish? That extra purchasing power you just got by hiking skill less jobs to $20/hr just vanished because now the things that used to cost $100 now cost $120 or more.
Poof
There went your pay raise.
That’s what happens when you aren’t elevating the skill set of workers and instead just artificially boosting the pay rate of workers with zero skills.
They should, and can be. It sounds like you’re unhappy with how your life has panned out and think everyone needs to be “grinding” 100% of the time to be better. Not everyone thinks that way or wants to. Just because you think a job is beneath you doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. If all the service industry workers, who you claim have no skills btw, stopped working then the world would cease to function in a day, if not hours.
You’re blaming the workers for the problems created by the ones with money.
It’s been statistically proven that costs don’t go up when minimum wage does. Europe has higher minimum wages and yet their prices tend to be lower than ours. So there’s no actual data to support things getting more expensive due to minimum wage increases. And surprise, the prices are going to raise wether or not you get a raise.
Because small businesses never fail and end up with the owner losing their shirt. But I suppose they deserve for their business to fail for not pulling their bootstraps hard enough or something, right?
I see. The only two options are be a “miserable piece of shit” as a “skill-less burger flipper” or be a highly skilled burger flipper running your own business that fails within a year and you go bankrupt. Gotcha.
Unskilled labour just means a job you can do with little training. Skilled labourers are like doctors, lawyer, engineers, tradespeople, etc. that take years of school and experience.
Nope. Those are in large part degreed or certified jobs, all labor requires a skill. Ask a fish to take out the trash and you’ll quickly figure out my meaning.
Words have specific meanings. We have commonly understood terminology. You can’t just deny this fact through revisionism without seriously losing your audience. Check out the agreed definition: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skilled_worker?wprov=sfti1
I just want to add, no, not all jobs require skills. Some jobs only require you to perform tasks, the tasks do not require any skill. What that means is virtually anyone can do it with very little training. For example a cook at McDonald’s only needs to be trained for about 2 weeks and they can perform the tasks required for their job. Unskilled jobs are important for young people to help them earn a living while developing skills.
Economists separate out skilled from unskilled labour for many reasons including shortages. In a skilled labour shortage for instance, it may take many years to recover (ie: doctor shortage) whereas with a shortage in unskilled labour the gap can be filled very quickly if employers are willing to raise wages. Because of the distinct quality skilled labour has we separate it out as it’s own type of labour. You couldn’t just walk into the doctors office with 2 weeks of training and start seeing patients.
As an analogy we could think of commodities vs specialized products. One stalk of corn or barrel of oil is nearly indistinguishable from another one of its kind, whereas an iPhone can’t be replaced by a Motorola and still hold the same properties.
Your own source states that it was not a thing before 1800 and is largely used by fascists for classism purposes.
All jobs require skill, point blank period. Name one task that does not require a skill, your choice and we’ll use your example for further discussion. You’re explaining jobs that require less skill not no skill. You could be a doctor with no training, would you be a very good doctor? Probably not but that isn’t at all the point.
That’s not a relevant analogy worth even discussing.
I don’t need to debate you on this. The definition is there in Wikipedia. I’m not going to use pre-19th century terminology to describe the modern labour market just because it suits your political agenda.
Aww don’t take your ball and go home. Your using 1900s labor propaganda, referencing said known propaganda (even by your own source) and still not seeing that you’re wrong.
Skilled laborer here, engineer. Unskilled labor deserves pay no worse than 10k what I make. I didn’t choose to be an engineer because it paid well. I, and most people in my class frankly, liked the subject. That’s all.
“skilled labor” here also, ive done many many jobs and all of them require a skill. Saying there’s “skilled labor” is just a way to say there is “unskilled labor” and pay less, but I guarantee you take the CEO of Wells Fargo and put them in a dish pit for a year they will learn rather quickly there is skill to it.
Pay everyone a wage that they can live on, at the minimum.
To be clear, as well, I am in the information technology sector and make $150/hr (calculated from my salary). So if people want to bust their ass to learn skills, it still works out well.
Welders, plumbers, electricians, etc. can make way more than $20/hr
Lol yeah in my state plumbers bill out at like 90 an hour and electricians at like 100. (Pre pandemic for what it’s worth). I get that it doesn’t all go to the tradesman but that’s still a good hourly rate
Sorry… you’re saying people without a “marketable skill” don’t deserve to make a living wage? If that’s the case, why not just exterminate them all and be done with it?
Hmmm… clearly you have no real argument, because we all know your slippery slope isn’t real argument. NEXT>>>
(how many other stupid comments are you going to make? At least some people can string a few sentences together and make a coherent point where you can tell there was some thought behind their argument. Misguided, sure, but at least they used some of their brain-cells to try to defend this idiotic news. Maybe merge all your stupid replies into one and try to make a compelling argument next time.)
I reject the entire premise. There are a ton ton ton of jobs that are way easier to deal with than working in fast food or retail. The “marketable skill” trope is just more classist bullshit so you can focus on the guy barely squeaking by instead of the record corporate profits and massive CEO compensation. I would be willing to bet actual dollars that anyone complaining about these folks making too much money wouldn’t last a single shift.
Also, we’re talking about fucking California. Even in the low-cost areas of CA, $20/hr still means roommates and ramen.
Why should anyone bust their ass learning a skill like welding or going to school for information technology or becoming a dental assistant or becoming an electrician when burger flippers will only be making a few dollars an hour less?
Because I sure as shit don’t want to flip my own burgers. I don’t always want to put in that effort. After I’m done working for the day I want to kick back. So what if anyone can flip a burger? Anyone can cut their own hair, but I sure as hell am not going to look good unless I pay a barber.
I’m not paying someone for having an exclusive skill. I’m paying them because they’re doing something that I don’t want to do, and they deserve to be compensated for that.
Get down from your high horse. Your job isn’t your worth. And I’m saying this as a chemical engineer who’s designed hundred million dollar equipment. The difference between what I do and what they do doesn’t warrant a 25k salary difference. Anything more than 10k is exorbitant. Our lives are only possible because someone has taken on a job that people don’t usually want. Someone keeps sewers running, picks up garbage, and cleans up after everyone. Unless you are willing to do their job 40 hours a week, put a sock in it.
Based on the number of downvotes of people critical here, the overwhelming majority here must make minimum wage.
So when you get your bachelors degree and get your first job making $25 an hour… why did you go to college and rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt again?
What are we doing to help people build enough wealth to own a home? because minimum wage is never going to afford it, even if it you make it $50/hr by 2030.
Raising the floor should cause all other wages to increase as well. No need to bucket-crab. All worker wages have been stagnant for almost a half-century, while their efforts have created more and more wealth due to technological advances.
What are we doing to help people build enough wealth to own a home? because minimum wage is never going to afford it, even if it you make it $50/hr by 2030.
That’s literally what minimum wage was intended to be. A living wage that allowed one to have a family, save for a house, and retirement. That sort of stuff was near reality in the mid-20th century. Even the character Al Bundy on Married with Children was portrayed as being able to afford a house and support a family on a single income as a shoe salesman, without being thought an unusual premise.
Minimum wage should be closer to $100/hr then in Boston. I can’t imagine anything less than 200k supporting a family with the white picket house, a retirement plan, and a commute that isn’t 2+ hours each way.
Definitely gonna quit my professional job to be a Barista at that point though. Way more fun.
I mean that would be an absolutely valid decision. We as a society have decided that we want Baristas to be a job. There’s people who would love nothing more than to do that with their lives and there’s no legitimate reason that they cannot - the world takes all kinds to stay interesting and make life worth living.
When you’re doing 1099 work you end up paying for your own health insurance and a little bit more in income taxes. The problem with construction contractor work is that it destroys your body over time. Definitely have seen master electricians, plumbers et al pull 150k+++ for many years in Mass.
And what does “raising the floor” do other than make everything more expensive?
Great, so you are now making $20/hr, but the cost to live just went up as well because apparently everyone else just got a raise as well.
People with actual skills and certifications and degrees aren’t going to stand for making just a few dollars more than some skill-less burger flipper, that’s for damn sure. So now their labor rates are going to eventually go up. When that happens, companies are just going to tack on another 10 or 20% to their prices.
So you solved absolutely nothing.
What used to cost $100, now costs $120. So you’ve made absolutely no headway in this because your aren’t adding to your skills and getting a better job. Instead you are simply trying to inflate skill-less jobs and pretend like they are artificially worth $20/hr.
And what does “raising the floor” do other than make everything more expensive?
What you’re talking about is what is referred to as a “Wage-Price Spiral”. While this is the idea that is pushed a lot, it is not actually based on factual data. All recent studies have refuted that it is actually a real thing - even the Cato Institute, a right-wing libertarian think-tank, acknowledges this. Current inflationary forces are overwhelming related to price gouging, extracting more money from society to go into the hoards of billionaires.
Real wages have stagnated since the 70s and completely decoupled from economic productivity under Reagan. The lack of a living minimum wage is nothing more than massive theft of earned wages. I do agree that just setting it at $20 is barely a half-measure. It needs to be tied to cost of living and adjusted annually, without legislative action.
You are deluded if you think that companies aren’t going to pass along the cost of their higher labor.
They have been doing that when the cost of gasoline jumps.
Or when the cost of shipping goes up. And those are typically seen as temporary price increased, and they still aren’t willing to absorb those price hikes.
But somehow now companies are just going to eat the cost of higher wages when that is a permanent change.
It is pretty obvious CA made weed legal because whole lots of people here have lost their minds.
It is great to see the US apply some sort of protection laws that actually matter. I would have liked to have seen this applied as a minimum wage across the board not just large companies. I get the feeling that companies will downsize just to avoid the law.
This quote is bloody awful to me. It is like an exert from a dickens novel.
Ingrid Vilorio, a fast-food worker at a Jack In The Box in the San Francisco Bay Area, said the increase in salary next year will bring some relief to her family, who until recently was sharing a house with two other families to afford rent.
In Massachusetts IT wages have stagnated for 12 years. Minimum wage has doubled. Rent has gone up 2.3x or so. Housing prices have just about doubled but it depends on location.
Junior IT people now make a couple bucks more than minimum wage. My wife was hiring for a couple of positions and the pay was around 42k. I still don’t understand how that works as a salary in 2023 in Boston.
I make 20 an hour at a coal mine. It would be really awesome if i didnt have to be congested all the time and could still get all i need. Im not an ambitious person but i wont let my husband live in poverty. If the minimum wage went up a lot of coal miners would become fast food workers, and the coal company would raise its hiring pay to cope with that. Also, theyd start a hiring spree.
So by raising the minimum wage a lot of new desirable jobs would open up in my community and all the old workers who only did it for the money would have more freedom.
It might sound ridiculous, but A LOT of people in heavy industry dont do it for the money. They like the work. I sort of do too tbh. I woild probably quit and then come back to the mines once the next hiring wave started so i could get a quick raise.
I downvoted you, but i dont like how everyone is so mean on Lemmy now. Just a few months ago it was all smiles and conversation. Now its like reddit and everyone just want to argue. Im not arguing with you. Im adding on to what you said.
We already saw a lot of that in my part of the country organically. When there were a number of job openings for some reason (did a lot of people suddenly die or something?), people in the bare minimum wage locations jumped up the rung into better positions, both to better pay and to lateral moves with fewer bad customers. We started getting those “Wendy’s closed, no one wants to work” signs, but the owner makes zero from a closed store, so the pay went up. Now the other burger places have to follow suit to keep the lights on.
We can actually see the reverse in a floor raise like this. The crappy jobs that made $20 will have people saying “screw this, I’ll just flip burgers,” and the worker shortage will be in the formerly higher paying (but less attractive) jobs, which will have to raise pay to attract people who could just ask if you want fries and make the same money. I predict the next tier jobs will either immediately raise pay, or moan that “no one wants to work” while we go to well staffed burger places with very efficient staffs, and enjoy very talents landscapers that actually enjoy their jobs.
I just want to touch on the “things will cost more argument,” which sounds so very, very ridiculous after the past 3 years. No raise in the minimum wage, but everything soared in price. To make that argument and not realize that the whole world makes your words a joke is the providence of a fool or a shill.
Well except if the prices are already going up, why would you want to add stress to the system that encourages them to go up even more? You’re assuming that things are disconnected but that’s in no way proven.
small raises in the minimum wage lead to slower wage growth for low-wage workers
minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years with the effects being strongest for younger workers and for those in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage-workers.
Other research shows less clear results of increasing the minimum wage as an antipoverty tool in disadvantaged neighborhoods and a decrease of worker hours and increase in capital investment following minimum wage increases
Just raise the wages! surely less hours available, slower job growth and slower wage growth is the best way.
I’m in Massachusetts and practically nobody actually gets paid the state minimum wage. Ice cream scoopers were making 16-18/hr+ before we had $15/hr minimum wage. I was making 10 back when our min was 8 as a cashier.
A National minimum wage hike is going to encourage job outsourcing. It’s already possible to pay someone $900/mo in Chile who speaks fluent English to recruit tech people. (That’s $5.19/hr.) Do you think lower tier professional jobs are going to increase, stay the same, or shrink in the US?
How do you think the rising cost of american labor will affect the import/export balance?
If you want to fix our problems start with insurance and pharma and continue on with the finance sector. Only by crushing those huge-profit-leeching industries by having similar regulations to what exists overseas will you bring down the high wage jobs and reduce the disparity.
Health insurance is only expensive because drugs have no standardized national pricing (like most of the world does.) Our health insurance is the highest in the world despite not providing the highest standard of care and paying not so great compared to single payer countries.
Then comes insurance… some of the highest paying roles out there are in big insurance companies. I’ve seen IT helpdesk roles advertised in Boston for 170k+ for executive support roles because insurance is such a glut with profit - they cannot ever lose. Medical insurance going single payer is an obvious thing but other insurances suffer other problems like maximum profit %s being regulation encouraging insurance companies to up gross price and cost to make an end result profit of X% based on the gross. They want to make more money and the only way is to raise prices and expenses.
It’s like the nursing home problem. They are designed to never make any actual money but they seem to pay their external company cleaning crew $1000/hr to clean and they are informed about inspections ahead of time so they can adjust staffing to appear appropriate. It’s all a game to make it look like their non-profit is really not making a profit for the owners but all the associated business to business supports they have also happen to be owned by the same owners as the nonprofit and those businesses are private and make a killing.
I’m not going to go into the finance side. I know i’ve already lost everybody.
Anyway, I know i’ll just get downvotes because “I WANT MORE MONEY” but the problems we have require a lot of big losers to reverse the hoarding of wealth by the wealthy and bring it down, and honestly a lot of the more well-to-do upper middle class would be greatly affected - it’ll never happen.
Hi, I make six figures and I’m very happy to see this (and also downvoted you for spreading this kinda division). Most half decent people are happy for others getting good things, not upset because they get something better or because it means you’re not as much better than them anymore.
We absolutely should also help home prices to be affordable. The current prices in many cities are completely unmaintainable for far too many people. Everyone needs housing, so it’s dumb for us to keep cropping the price of it up.
Shills who behave like bots are bots. Anyone spreading bullshit to destabilize legitimate discussion via fallacious reasoning can fall off a cliff, for all I care
From what I remember from doing that math it costs something like 34¢ extra for a Big Mac to double labor costs from $15/hr to $30/hr.
Increases in price are not due to increased costs they’re due to being able to get away with it. Forcing poor people to continue being poor and still letting prices raise is fucking dumb. Poor people getting more money is very good for the economy as they don’t have enough money to not have to spend it all, so giving them more means more being spent.
… 13 employees working at all times they are open? lol. Shit they likely average 6. One being a shift who already makes above minimum wage (though to be honest its probably not even 20 or 30/hr). Also, customers does not equal meals. Very hard to get a good read on that when you’re overestimating minimum wage hours worked and underestimating amount of products sold.
95% of McDonald’s are franchised. Virtually all of the people you will ever see at a McDonald’s really work for “John Doe’s Eastern McDonald’s Franchises #2 LLC” and are therefore not counted.
McDonald’s pays a minimum wage above $20/hr US in a ton of countries in Europe and still has the same menu and near identical prices. What does that tell you?
Like that won’t happen anyway regardless of any minimum wage levels… At least this way people will get less robbed over time. It should be an indexed linked raise as well.
They really don’t even have econ 101 down though. Like the “willing and able” sentence they keep parroting ignores the difference between elastic and inelastic demand. The insulin statement above further shows they don’t understand it.
They have high school economics down, but not anything more than that. They’re one of those “supply and demand” parrots who barely understand the concept but think they’re an expert
I mean, that kinda proves the point. People will pay pretty much anything for necessary medicine.
Of course, the takeaway should be that market dynamics aren't really appropriate for medical costs, since that basis of what one is willing to pay doesn't really apply when the consequence is literal death.
But like, how can they milk us for more than we’re able to give?
Yeah, you can charge $100 billion for a studio apartment, but nobody is going to buy it.
The same logic is at play for raising rent. You can’t raise it beyond what people can pay, or else you’ll lose customers and make less money overall.
Not sure why this needs to be explained to you. You think they’re refusing to charge $100 billion for a studio apartment out of the goodness of their hearts? Lol. No. It’s market forces.
People will pay whatever it takes to not be homeless. If that means 75% of my paycheck is going to a shitty apartment, then i have to take on more debt to afford things like food. Landlords will continue to squeeze until something breaks.
Like someone not understanding that minimum wage workers not being able to afford to live where they work is different than ANYONE being able to live there?
Weird.
“I took micro economics and I think I’m smarter than everyone cuz I’ve never heard macroeconomics exists.”
I’m purely talking about rent prices. Not who and who cannot pay it. Rent is going to be priced to maximize profit. This means as soon as people can pay more, they will charge more.
If an apartment complex sees they can make more money by raising rents above what those making minimum wage can pay, then any minimum wage tenants will be replaced by those with more money.
I wholeheartedly believe everyone who doesn’t understand this is looking at the downvotes first, and logic second.
The amount of nonsense I had to read in this comment chain is appalling. But it just shows me the vast majority of you don’t understand basic economics, yet think you do because you agree with people who are wrong.
You seem to think you understand but again, you’re looking at only micro and not macro. It’s not like there’s one apartment next to McDonald’s where everyone who works there rents. People working minimum wage are taking public transport into the city to get to work because they’re already priced out of city apartments. Rent raises literally constantly, it has nothing to do with minimum wage because those apartments are not reliant on minimum wage workers. Hell teachers can’t even afford to live in LA last I remember. Those on minimum wage can’t afford rent there and just have to travel farther for work and live shittier lives.
Ah yes, the one place every single minimum wage employee lives! I forgot! That place! That exists in reality, where no other person lives, at all, and their landlord will certainly be the only think the have increased in that time, and definitely totally look at all their earnings before doing so, and thus it MUST be that minimum wage going up $5 will raise rent by $800/month!
Again, you’re not understanding because you choose to only look at two things as if there are no other influences which is just wrong. Could rent rise? Sure, it could for literally any fucking reason at all. Work from home affected rent in most places that support minimum wage workers more than anything since it allowed people who make more to move away from the city. Vice Versa Plenty of min wage workers will choose to not work two jobs just to survive if they don’t have to.
Look at everything in the region instead of just two pieces.
The real answer that no one is giving you is this:
Aggregate demand for housing in the area is through the roof, which is why prices are actually rising. If you move out because you can’t pay, there will literally be hundreds, or more, people lined up who can - this incentivizes raising the price because the market can clearly handle it.
But like, how can they milk us for more than we’re able to give?
The logic of the market is that if there’s anyone in the market that can afford it, whether or not you can’t isn’t their problem, it’s yours.
This is one of the basic reasons why wide income inequality is a problem- when the going housing market rate is a measure of what the wealthy people in that market can bear, it creates serious problems for everyone else. For example, the median home in Seattle lists at $800k and that’s not a measure of what the median earner can afford, it’s a measure of what Blackrock is willing to pay to outbid folks earning in the $250k/yr range.
Existing tenants priced out will choose not to renew their leases or default. That rids them of anyone not able.
Then they can set the rent as high as they’d like, because there’s s no shortage of venture capitalist vampires that’ll pay way over market for an apartment if they think they can make money off it. They’ll pull perfectly good housing stock off the market so some shady LLC or foreign national can continue to treat real estate like securities, or even just sit on it, vacant.
People are debating you because you’re operating under a different definition of “able to pay”. Yes technically they can’t get blood from a stone. If I make $100 dollars a month they can’t charge me $101 for rent or I can’t live there. But under the “30%” rule I shouldn’t pay more than $30 in rent, the theory being that I need the additional $70 dollars a month for utilities, food, gas etc and in theory I still have some left over for savings, incidentals, etc.If all the landlords in my area are charging $50 in rent for a studio I can technically pay that, but somethings taking a hit in my budget and it probably won’t be utilities (running water), food (got to eat), or gas (gotta get to work) so it’ll be my savings, incidentals, etc funds. Now I have no savings and can’t pay an emergency expense like a flat tire because that extra $20 a month I could have saved went to my rent because I could “technically pay it.”
The way your comment is worded makes it sound like you probably think living check to check is a personal choice because someone didn’t want to tug on their boot straps hard enough. Should the market adjust if people dont want to pay a certain amount in rent? In theory, yes. The reason rent is skewed away from the consumer in a traditional market adjustment is that people need a place to live. So theyll keep paying till they literally can’t and become homeless. If we were talking about the cost of luxury items then the market adjustment would be much quicker because people can afford not to buy parrot petting poles but it’s harder to just quit buying it when its food or rent and that makes it ripe for abuse.
The way your comment is worded makes it sound like you probably think living check to check is a personal choice because someone didn’t want to tug on their boot straps hard enough.
I have no idea where you guys are getting this from.
My point is simple, but I feel like the downvotes had their snowball effect and people who can’t think for themselves are doing mental gymnastics to fit in with the crowd.
Holy shit dude. Literally everyone is telling you you’re wrong, some nicer people are even taking time to politely explain why you’re meeting so much resistance to your opinion. And you’re just shoving your fingers in your ears and screaming NAH NAH NAH I can’t hear you GROUPTHINK DOWNVOTES ME RIGHT YOU WRONG.
Its fucking exhausting trying to help people like you. Why anyone tries is beyond me. Enjoy your inability to think critically and assurance of your correctness. Don’t fucking bother replying
My rent has gone up every year like clockwork whether I get a raise or not. Landlords have never needed an excuse to raise rent, stop treading water for them.
This is why I hate those arguments. Anytime we talk about raising wages, people complain about things getting more expensive. But what’s the plan when an hours worth of work can only get you a gallon of milk? Because without wages going up, it’s gonna get to that point. And then even high end paying jobs will still leave people in poverty. Like right now I’m making more money than I ever have. I make a little over $20 an hour. 5 years ago that sounded amazing. I also just moved in with an old roommate yesterday because me and my boyfriend can no longer afford our own place. We went form moving in to the apartment in 2020 with money being a little tight, but still having some extra for fun stuff, to the last few months I’ve been ending each month with $2-3 in my bank account.
But now we are supposed to be worried about price increases because of minimum going up? Now it’s an issue?
The core issue that causes high rents is significantly greater demand relative to supply. If 2000 people want to move to a city, but only 1000 units are available, then the richest 1000 get apartments and the rest don't. If you institute rent controls, you still only get 1000 people - perhaps more randomly selected - getting apartments, but you also destroy any incentive for additional housing supply to be created, or even maintained. At best, the people who already have apartments save money while it becomes nearly impossible for anyone to actually move, since moving means that you're giving up your controlled rent and will face a substantial increase. As this happens, housing stock tends to deteriorate because landlords have zero reason to actually maintain it, because what are you gonna do? Move, and watch your rent significantly increase? No, you'll stay and just deal with it. Meanwhile, the plucky 22 year old who wants to move to the city struggles immensely because there's essentially no supply. As the economist Assar Lindbeck - a socialist, I might add - put it: "In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing."
In situations like this, it's critically important to understand why rents are high, and there's more going on there than landlords being greedy. Everyone is greedy, and always has been. It's not as if landlords in 1970s New York City were just kinder and more generous people. Ultimately, they'll charge as much as the market will bear, and there are many more factors that go into that than greed. The fundamental issue is a lack of supply, and any solution that doesn't address that is little more than a band-aid. And that's not to say that the only solution here is massive deregulation and letting private developers run amok; public housing can absolutely play a role as well. But there's simply no getting around the fact that if you want to lower market rents, you must either increase supply (Tokyo is an example of city that has done this exceptionally well) or slash demand by making the city undesirable (1970s NYC is an unfortunate example of this). One of those options is obviously more desirable.
Yeah. I would expect that the Montreal REM is going to help with housing prices as it extends subway like capacity to large parts of the region that don’t have anything like that. That way, you can increase the area available for transit development.
There are areas full of empty houses/apartments that still charge far more than what the median employees there could pay; which seems to defeat that logic.
The argument that there’s no incentive to build housing under rent control seems to suggest the only reason you’d build housing is for year-over-year constant increases in profits - and that a simple constant revenue stream has no value at all. Even if large housing companies believed this, smaller competitors might not.
But those high rent areas… Okay I don’t know first hand, but in my reading I’ve been led to believe that it’s because companies like Black Rock come in and buy all the available properties, and whenever a property becomes available they buy it. They can then charge whatever they want and nobody has a choice because they bought all the available inventory, and they have deep enough pockets to outbid any competition. They don’t care if a unit goes vacant because they’re making it up on another unit. You can rent two units for $100, for rent one for $100 and leave the other one vacant; the revenue is the same but you’re actually better off leaving one vacant because you don’t have to pay for maintenance on it, and it’s one less property you have to actively manage. They could actually save money by leaving units vacant.
Price controls are really tricky because they vary. They would need to be set at a local level. But they also completely violate supply and demand logistics.
Lately I feel like maybe for-profit landlording shouldn’t be allowed at all, but I’m not sure how that would work.
Some people totally can’t afford to buy, or are only short timers, and need to rent. The people who provide that service including the maintenance are providing useful thing and deserve to get paid a fair wage. You can’t pick on them and punish them.
It’s the people who buy on speculation and then rent it out for more than their mortgage, so they’re getting their investment income and their rent income both. And if you do this with enough houses you end up raking in huge amounts of money. That’s when the giant investment funds get involved.
I think not allowing giant investment funds might be a good start. Maybe limiting the number of units.
Maybe a different tactic would work: for every three units you rent, you have to provide one unit of low income housing at a government set rate (which might be free) and standard of quality. At least that way if they’re going to make a profit they have to give back.
Another option would be: you can charge whatever rent you want, but are only allowed to pay for necessary services such as property management and maintenance. Any excess income automatically goes into a government pool that is used to subsidize rent for those who can’t afford it. It absolutely cannot be siphoned off into investment income. That means if you charge low rents you’re going to rent all your properties and be able to vet the people renting them; if you charge very high rent you’re going to have a lot of unrented properties, and the government will be able to put anyone they want in there–even people who might trash the place or turn it into a meth house. That incentivizes keeping rents as low as reasonably possible, I’m trying to make your tenants happy so that you don’t end up with any vacancies.
California kind of has it state wide. Rent increases are capped at 5% + CPI up to 5% annually. Which means it's 5-10% annually depending on that years inflation. If you don't increase one year, you can't increase double the next year. The downside is this means a lot of places just automatically do the 5% increase every year and then there are also issues with people being evicted for "renovations" so that they can increase the rent more than the cap for new tenants.
It's better than no protections but it's still not great.
They’re raising rent because corporations with massive cash piles are buying up housing and raising the rent dial. Because there’s little downward pressure on house prices (cheap gov housing targeted at first time buyers, vacancy taxes, bans on short term rentals, grants for housing sold below market value, etc), there’s little incentive to turn the dial the other way.
There are definitely exceptions, but they’re just that: exceptions.
Overall, most things are priced according to what people are willing and able to pay. Apartment rent in this case is not an exception. As soon as people can pay more, landlords will charge more.
It’s sad this needs to be spelled out for you, but that’s probably why you’re bad with money.
Do everyone a favor and look up inelastic demand before dying on this hill. Rent is a necessity, people need to pay for it. It’s price is not as directly correlated to supply and demand as the price of luxury goods for example.
It’s sad this needs to be spelled out for you, but that’s probably why you’re bad with money.
Nice trolling, I won’t respond to this. Be better.
“No I REFUSE to educate myself!” he said while repeatedly demonstrating he has no clue what he’s talking about. People like you should just vanish. You’re the problem and you’re too stupid to acknowledge it.
The real world doesn’t work according to basic economics, as basic economics generally assumes best case scenarios to dumb it down for the average person.
They don’t need an excuse. In the absence of some other limiting factor they will raise rent to what the market can bear, and it turns out that when it comes to something with as severe a supply constraint as land has, the market can bear an awful lot.
There's more going on in supply restriction than the scarcity of land. Zoning restrictions and things like weaponized environmental review play a massive role.
In a whopping 38% of San Francisco, a city known for its horrendous housing market, it is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes. Is it really so shocking that there's a supply issue when you have land use policies like this?
While I support on principle the rights of lower levels of government to do what they think is best, I will admit that in practice this often leads to outcomes that are frustrating and disappointing enough that I think we probably need some limits on that power.
Ultimately, local regulation of land use is a pretty classical Prisoner's Dilemma; by all local communities optimizing for their own blinded utility, they're creating a net worse situation for everyone involved, including themselves. It's really the textbook example of a case where a higher authority like a state government needs to come in and force everyone to actually collaborate.
If every community increases housing supply by a little bit, the effect on the local "character" is nearly unnoticeable but the housing market stays healthy. If they all refuse, the market melts down and we get the mess we have now (and parents have the comical audacity to then complain about how their kids can't afford to live in the same area).
No, not even close. Housing is a necessity. It’s not a new iPhone. You can’t just say “wow housing prices are way too high I guess I’ll fuck off to the forest.” This is already in the initial stages of systemic collapse. The lords will keep squeezing and raising prices, and more and more people are being left behind. You see this all over, notably in the rise of homelessness and tent-cities.
When you raise wages the market can bear more. Say you’re paying $1,000 a month and have just enough left over for necessities. You get a raise for $200 a month, now the landlady can raise rent $200 and you’re left exactly the way you were before. She won’t figure this out right away of course, she’ll just keep playing with the rent until she hits a point where people are able to pay and she has a unit sitting vacant. Once that unit rents then she can start raising again
And the unit will rent as soon as someone–who previously couldn’t afford rent–gets a raise that makes them able to afford it. Soon the rent for everyone goes up, and now someone’s not able to afford it anymore and has to move out.
The end result is that one homeless person now has a home, one person who previously had a home is now homeless, everyone got shafted with higher rent, and everybody’s available spending money remains the same.
This is why nothing ever changes and the poor will always be poor: the system just designed to suck all excess cash out and put it in the pockets of the investors (landlords, banks, BlackRock, etc). The problem is not wages, because the market will always adjust to eat the wages. The system screws you because it was designed to screw you, and the people who have the ability to fix it don’t want to because they are the ones who benefit from it.
Even so, the problem is not capitalism, it’s our specific form of radically unregulated capitalism, combined with intentional inflation, fiat currency, and laws that favor corporations over people. No doubt that list could be made quite a bit longer!
I’m not willing to abandon capitalism but this version of it has become corrupted.
Prices go up according to whatever they can get. (Also, leaving it empty isn’t necessarily bad for them either because they can often write it off, which is bullshit. They should have to pay extra for empty units.)
Willingness has nothing to do with it. People need housing, it’s a necessity not a luxury.
As for ability, have you noticed the housing market? Prices are already wildly in excess of what many Americans can afford at all.
The whole point is that anyone who puts in their 40-50 hrs a week should be able to live in safety and dignity. That’s largely not possible on minimum wage right now.
You’re here to argue, but you don’t understand what you’re arguing about. There is no value in trying to explain something to the unwilling when they’re just going to spin in circles until they think they’re right.
My guy, are you stupid of a shill working for some disinformation company? Have you ever heard of the 90’s dotcom bubble? Have you ever heard of the Dutch Tulip mania? Capitalism doesn’t care about reality, only about maximizing apparent profits.
There are countries in Europe with cheaper rent than the US with 2-3x the minimum wage amount. The two are barely even related in the grand scheme of things.
There are countries in Europe with cheaper rent than the US with 2-3x the minimum wage amount.
Bullshit. Are you talking about 2-3x the FEDERAL minimum wage, or California’s STATE minimum wage?
Please point to the European countries that have a minimum wage of $31/hour, which is twice the California state minimum wage. That’s literally what engineers get paid, lol.
If you’re talking FEDERAL minimum wage, then I’d point out that rent prices in California are some of the highest in the country. It’s because people in California have more money to spend, so everything they buy is more expensive. It’s a simple concept I’ve been saying since the beginning.
Man. The more replies I see, the clearer it becomes that the vast majority of people in this comment chain have no clue what they’re talking about. They’re just twisting their brains in knots to find ways to agree with the crowd because they can’t think for themselves.
I said US, and Europe in reference to minimum wage. Why the fuck would you think I was possibly talking about the California minimum wage after mentioning a nation and a continent?
Because we’re talking about California’s minimum wage, and there aren’t European nations that have 2-3x the US federal minimum wage with substantially lower rent than poor states in the US.
Also, I don’t hold you above the sly rhetoric of comparing California’s rent to European nation’s while only considering the FEDERAL minimum wage. It goes hand-in-hand with the mental gymnastics ya’ll are twisting yourself in to agree with the crowd.
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