I think it's reasonable for young people to have flatmates and share an apartment, for example.
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.
These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.
Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?
There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.
Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.
Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).
50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing and you get a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.
I think others pointed this out but I don't think you can find any data to prove this because its not true.
I'm not a historian but I have seen a number of old movies and in those movies it was very common for the characters to be some poor schlub with a full time job at the factory living in some sort of group home/flophouse situation. Movies tend to reflect stories that resonate with the public at the time so I suspect that is because this was a common situation. I'd much prefer a single roommate in an apartment to a flophouse.
Why would that be reasonable? College students and young adults usually have roommates. I don't feel it's inhumane.
> The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further
Another reason to argue otherwise is because you care about the truth. Even if you and I agree on the ends, if you use the means of exaggerating or stretching the truth to get there, you are never on my side. Saying that you need to not have roommates to live is an exaggeration.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
You will never find any data to support that because it isn't true. 50 years ago, flophouses were common. You would share a bedroom room with others, with shared kitchen and bathroom between multiple bedrooms. In college, I lived in a housing-coop network where we slept two to a room. 50 years ago, they slept 4 or 6 to a room in my exact house.
> and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times
This is true. But there is a very natural reason why. Look at nearly any US city, and see how many more jobs there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. Then look at how many more homes there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. You will see that the number of new jobs far exceeds the number of new homes. The result is that wealthier people bid up the housing, while poor people are forced to live outside the city and commute. So why have no new houses been built? It can't be helped by the fact that building new homes is illegal. (e.g. buildings with 3 or more apartments are illegal in 70% of san francisco.)
Please direct your anger in the right direction! It's not generally the case that billionaires own thousands of homes, hoarding them while the poor live on the street. It's more often the case that the population has increased while the number of homes in places people want to live has stayed the same. The *only* solution is to increase the number of homes in places people want to live. Raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, fighting corporations, adding rent control laws, none of that will help solve the root of the problem, the growth rate of homes in cities is far slower than the rate of people wanting to live there!