Certainly the point of unemployment insurance is to keep so many people from accepting lower wages in desperation.
I think employer power against workers would be 99% as asymmetric and in need of intervention in the form of wage & labor standards, labor organization, etc. if homelessness were as rare as in 1975.
Fair point. But that doesn't mean that fear of homelessness isn't a major fear in 2024 for people in precarious financial situations. They might have needed other exploitation methods in 1975 that are less relevant now, although I'm having trouble thinking of one.
Overall it's the meme that everything about our political-economic situation must be a conscious, planned conspiracy of a few. We banned apartments in the 70s* due mostly to grassroots racist/classist activism, and boom, 10 years later, street homelessness gets noticed as a new phenomenon. It helps the cause of landed wealth, but lots of other older people who aren't super-rich.
*Such regulations started at the beginning of the century but the 70s was the new wave, more aggressive & blanket applicable.
It helps the cause of landed wealth, but lots of other older people who aren't super-rich.
I can't tell which word is missing from the second half of this sentence. "But also" or "but not"?
And then because market logic happened not to be so exclusionary with, say, fast food, fast food being cheaply available to the masses turns out to be... also a sinister conspiracy!
The truth is that without direct counter-intervention, in our system, the majority of naturally occurring phenomena will militate toward wealth and inequality. Many people tried and succeeded at helping this process along - Reagan, Trump, Greenspan - but I'm wary of labeling absolutely everything The Plan / How They Get You.
Overall it's the meme that everything about our political-economic situation must be a conscious, planned conspiracy of a few.
I don't know if it's quite this reductionist. I see it more as: let's observe the fears that are entrenched and who they benefit.
8: I guess it works in that sense. But I do see it as equally consistent with a conspiracy view.
Are there really a lot of people that think that because a person is "unskilled " they shouldn't be paid a living wage for a full-time job?
11: the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour.
"Homelessness sets the floor for everyone's wages" doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. A floor is a thing that you can't drop below.
Moby points out correctly that unemployment benefits set a floor for wages - if benefits are $200 a week, then very few jobs are going to offer less than that. (Some will because of the apprenticeship/internship thing - you take the hit in the hope of higher wages later. But most won't.)
Other things could set the floor too. The cost of living might; if you can't survive in this town for less than $200, then jobs will have to offer more than that because otherwise people will just leave town.
A very large employer of last resort might set a floor as well - if everyone always has the option of going and clearing undergrowth for the local government for $200 a week, other jobs will have to offer more than that (or I guess nicer conditions).
Homelessness, though, can't set a floor for wages. How would it?
Fucking UPMC sets the ceiling on local wages until you get senior enough to be able to leave town.
the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour.
Another example of a floor on wages which I should have included. (Though only 1.1% of workers are on minimum wage, so not a very important floor.)
I think it's mushier than that: "Homelessness is the floor of human experience currently." In other words, no one is worse off than homeless people in this paradigm.
You could extrapolate that they mean "no one lives in fear of being enslaved or tortured in a mass sense, for our purposes. So this is the worst case scenario that's on the table for low-income workers."
17: that doesn't really explain anything about wages even if it were true, though. Suppose you abolished homelessness; would it make any sense to say "dying of lung cancer sets the floor for everyone's wages"? "Being in prison for life sets the floor for everyone's wages"?
Also it equates homelessness with joblessness, no? Not really true.
18: But those aren't fears that keep people in shitty jobs.
I wonder how many people get paid just above minimum wage and have their salary set based on minimum wage even though they earn more. When I started at McDonald's, they paid us $3.35 even though minimum wage was $3.25. They wanted to be just above minimum wage while still being as cheap as possible.
I think "they're unskilled and don't deserve a livable wage" is probably less common than two others, which are "the market decides what to pay unskilled workers, like it or not" and "unskilled workers in the US generally do get a liveable wage".
The median hourly income for an unskilled worker in the US in 2023 was $13.68, which is going to be more liveable in some areas than others.
Also it equates homelessness with joblessness, no? Not really true.
I certainly don't think it does this.
But those aren't fears that keep people in shitty jobs.
Good point. You'd only stay in a shitty job for fear of dying of cancer if you lived in some sort of bizarre dystopia where your healthcare was tied to your employer.
I think they needed to pay above minimum wage because you had to wear a stupid hat and serve your drunk friends. But they didn't have to complete with "real jobs". Those started at about $5 per hour.
23: it does, though. Your employer cannot take your house away. All she can do is take your job away. Saying "I am staying in this shitty job for fear of homelessness" only makes sense if losing your job means losing your home!
What actually keeps people in shitty jobs is the belief (correct or otherwise) that they're in the best or only job they can hope for. If you know you can walk out the door and easily get another better job, why not do it?
The median hourly income for an unskilled worker in the US in 2023 was $13.68, which is going to be more liveable in some areas than others.
Which is $28,454/year. According to this, that's below the living wage in every single state. And $13.68 is the median!
I also think, and this is something I only have vaguely formulated so it's not as clear as it might be, that homelessness is more explainable as about housing being too scarce and expensive than as about wages being too low. People who are making generally reasonable money find housing economically stressful in a way that's a problem.
26: I meant that it does not equate joblessness with homelessness, because it is neutral on the fact there are all sorts of people without jobs who are supported by other people.
I just saw a thing about how there are 1.5 million unoccupied housing units in the US - 2nd homes, VRBO, etc - and only 650K homeless people. I'm absolutely not saying that there's any way the former solves the problem of the latter, but we have a wealth mis-distribution problem, not an actual housing shortage.
C'mon, ya punks!! Hit me with your best shot! Is this the best you can do?
I actually am expecting students to come by any minute. So your best shot will appear to level me, but I'm actually explaining logarithms to young Texans.
30 sounds more like a house mis-distribution problem than a wealth mis-distribution problem, surely. If there are 10m people who want to live in NYC and only 9m homes, that problem will not be addressed by making all those people wealthier, nor by the existence of 1m empty homes in Arkansas.
30: I think stats like that are mostly bullshit. They're calling empty houses in small towns in Nebraska with no jobs available housing; they're counting every apartment that's empty for six weeks being painted between tenants, and so on. You can't aggregate nationally, you have to look at it market by market.
it is neutral on the fact there are all sorts of people without jobs who are supported by other people.
Do these other people, who are supporting them, have jobs? They do.
The empty homes issue can be addressed by local councils over here using Empty Dwelling Management Orders - if a house is vacant for more than six months, the council has the legal power to break down the door, do it up, and rent it out for up to seven years.
They can even seize and sell empty homes - the owner gets the money once expenses are deducted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g518le0r5o
But the problem is that doing all this takes staff and time and money, which local councils don't have. Yes, they can recover expenses - afterwards. But they don't have the resources up front.
Agree with 28. The specific realm I'm most familiar with is grad students needing higher wages now than they did in the past because of increased housing costs. And although I agree that they need raises, the old equilibrium of lower but livable pay because you lived in cheap housing was better. It's not sustainable to pay grad students $40k, they're just not bringing in that kind of value (they work half-time, require huge faculty resources, and aren't good at what they do yet). The upshot will be PhD programs disappearing in huge numbers. (Fewer grad students is probably good, but I think it's going to shrink more than is desirable.)
Similarly, lots of small fun businesses only work if their rent and pay are low, so again you need cheap housing, raising pay isn't going to keep book stores open in SF, they'll just go under.
I think the fear of losing health insurance is a bigger factor for keeping the middle class in line than fear of losing housing. Less so with Obamacare, but still there.
Yeah, the 5 million uninsured in Texas are not staying in their jobs in case they get cancer.
If you have any kind of assets at all, like a house you have equity in, losing health insurance is a gamble with your middle class status.
I just saw a thing about how there are 1.5 million unoccupied housing units in the US - 2nd homes, VRBO, etc - and only 650K homeless people. I'm absolutely not saying that there's any way the former solves the problem of the latter, but we have a wealth mis-distribution problem, not an actual housing shortage.
Sorry, not sure if you're being facetious now? I thought this meme had been covered many, many times here. Since so many of these vacant units are unsuitable for housing people, much less homeless people - due to being geographically mismatched, or being in bad condition, etc. - plus some sizable quantity of vacancies is needed for some basic rate of turnover, the underlying issue is in fact quantity, not distribution.
Today I was talking with someone who works at a convenience store who has repeatedly decided against getting a higher paying job in the restaurant industry because, by getting more pay, she would lose access to the state-funded health insurance that covers her diabetes.
The kernel of truth in that unoccupied housing meme is that I see a lot of resources going to build and upgrade nice, mostly empty vacation homes in rural areas at a time when there is a shortage of qualified labor available to build out missing-middle projects in town.
I remember when West Virginia was trying to get remote workers, which seems like a good way to move demand to supply. But I've also seen the TV commercials for their Republican primary, so there's no way.
The meme is literally true in the sense that the statistics are true. It just points one in entirely the wrong direction.
43: Did you see the Washington post article over the weekend about townhomes as good missing middle housing?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/american-dream-buy-townhouse/
Have people considered that townhouses can be chewed on by groundhogs and that professionals who off groundhogs charge hundreds of dollars?
Have people considered the inalienable right not to have a shadow cast on the property they bought decades ago?
That only matters on February 2nd.
We just legalized townhomes as an option for infill. Now we need to find people to build them.
They are all busy building dream houses for rich people.
You should try a land value tax then.
We have enough property taxes. An income tax would nice.
I'm not suggesting a new property tax, but replacing the current property tax with one that taxes based only on the land value.
Also having the wealthy ride to hounds that chase only groundhogs.
We paid the woman who did our childcare $25 / hr (generally 20 hours a week). If you asked us what we thought she deserved, we would have said a lot more. She's helping raise our child! But if we paid her what we thought she deserved, we wouldn't have been able to afford her.
Insofar as there is an ideology of desert that warps where wages get set in this country, I think it's much more common in the other direction: that the current level of rich people's wages has strong correlations to their relative level of talent or contribution.
Even here, a desert metric wouldn't always be progressive: if you paid each member of my team by how much they actually contributed, the salary band would be much wider, not narrower.
replacing the current property tax with one that taxes based only on the land value.
Does this work? How does one convince the voters to go along with a massive reshuffling of property tax bills?
It works but it's very hard to sell to voters so very few places have done it.
One component by making sure tax increases are not due until realization (for individual owner-occupants at least).
58: Who's got two thumbs and lives in a neighborhood full of duplexes, townhouses, and single-family homes on 3,000 square feet lots?
Sorry, not sure if you're being facetious now?
Somewhere in the middle? What I meant was really that it's literally not much housing needed to house all 650K homeless people. Yes, it would need to be built and it's not other people's vacation homes. That's why I said " I'm absolutely not saying that there's any way the former solves the problem of the latter". If there was political will to solve homelessness, it would be solved.
Yes, we need more affordable housing everywhere. This certainly has a lot to do with homelessness. But housing was affordable in the 80s and there were plenty of homeless people.
I so wish I could find the actual clip of this Night Court scene.
I think this graphic is actually trying to undermine the difference between "unskilled" and "skilled". The reason jobs are unskilled is that they don't require skills (useful distinction for studying an economy), not because it's a conspiracy to keep wages down. Unskilled workers ought to make a liveable wage, too.
62: Was homelessness really as bad nationally in the 80s? It was bad in NYC, and maybe SF, so it showed up on NY-based TV, but I don't think encampments were a thing in the rest of the country as much as they are now. But maybe I'm wrong.
Wikipedia:
In 1984, the Federal government determined that somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Americans were homeless
Now it's 650K.
It also says homelessness doubled from 1984 to 1987, which makes me a little skeptical of the fact in 65, though.
My guess is that until we started doing Point in Time surveys, all the data is terrible.
But housing was affordable in the 80s and there were plenty of homeless people.
I believe there is research that what was happening in the 80's was that after the 70's wave of downzoning the bottom-most tier of rentable units (including but not limited to SROs) was drying up, so the middle class didn't feel what was going on, but if you couldn't find a job for years, you were suddenly at risk of being homeless where before there would be a cheap place you could rent. (There were particularly poor outcomes among the low-income Black cohort that came of age just during the Reagan recession - the first shaken out as the economy got more inequitable, who a few years before before might have gotten factory jobs.)
And importantly, it was quite new to the 80's. People were literally saying, "Why are people sleeping on the streets now? Fifteen years ago you barely ever saw people sleeping in the streets." Closure of long-term psychiatric facilities was cited but was probably not sufficient to explain.
Strongly recommend Homelessness is a Housing Problem.
The data is still pretty bad, honestly, but it's way better than it was just a few years ago and certainly miles ahead of whatever they had in the '80s.
69: I thought the party line was that homelessness was due to Reagan shutting down the mental hospitals.
But yes, we've talked about single room rentals, etc, ultra-cheap housing here before.
71: Yes, I am swimming against the tide in rejecting that as prime driver. Also Reagan participated but Democratic-run states were doing it too starting in the 60's - those hospitals were nightmares and it made sense to shut them down, we just never followed through on making better alternative modes of treatment in sufficient quantity.
Anyway, to quote REO Speedwagon, I've forgotten what I started fighting for. It's time to bring this ship into the shore.
I think the Reagan-era end to institutionalization had a stronger effect on visible people sleeping on the street than on the overall numbers of homeless people. There are plenty of homeless people who wouldn't have been institutionalized in the past, but the more competent they are, the more likely they are to be hard to identify as homeless in public.
I remember the office I used to work in was involved with a highly detailed census of the homeless population of Ohio in the 80s. But the office is no more.
Even homeless offices are a problem now!!
Ah, the Phil Foundation
"We donate a lot to the arts. Have you ever heard of the orchestra called the New York Harmonic?"
"Isn't it called the New York Philharmonic?"
"It is now!"
78 seems to be utterly off topic but very funny.