
California poverty rate highest in U.S. when housing costs factored in - jseliger
https://la.curbed.com/2018/9/14/17856870/california-poverty-rate-housing-cost-of-living
======
hellofunk
This suggests that poverty rates do not consider the important factors
required to accurately assess if someone is able to afford life. Which
surprises me. Why wouldn't cost of living be included in a term that by
definition refers to the ability to cover the cost of living?

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anothergoogler
It's why you should be skeptical of the "X% of people globally have been
lifted out of extreme poverty in the past X years" stories.

~~~
jopsen
Don't confuse extreme poverty and poverty.

Extreme poverty is defined as: "a condition characterized by severe
deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water,
sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends
not only on income but also on access to services."

Generally, I'm skeptical of adjusting for cost of living when you have housing
prices as you do in the bay area. You still have options to move away.

~~~
luckydata
yeah, as long as you don't care leaving the place you grew up in, your family
and friends, not to mention having to actually figure out another place to go,
find a job, get a new place (including deposit).

Easy.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the bay area is an actual place
with a non-transient population, not just a venue for tech workers to
establish themselves.

~~~
drawnwren
We don't live in a society that gives you a birthright to the building you're
born in. I'm not sure why we should have a birthright to a geographically
delineated number of them.

~~~
zapita
You’re right that people being displaced by gentrification don’t have a
birthright to continue living in their neighborhood. The problem is that the
people displacing them _do_ have a birthright - the birthright to anyone’s
neighborhood, anywhere in the world. Do you also feel like that is a problem,
or do you only object to “birthrights” for poor people who depend on their
neighborhood for support and sometimes survival?

~~~
drawnwren
They don't have a birthright to a place any more than those displaced. Do you
honestly think the displacers want, more than anything else, to live in a very
expensive apartment in San Francisco? If they have some birthright to
"anyone's neighborhood," why aren't they all living in mansions on the beach?
The only birthright we agree on is the right to resolve disputes according to
the rules of our government. Money provides a way to mediate the situation
where two people want the same thing without them having to shoot each other
over it. I much prefer the model where the mode of competition is economic
benefit rather than "ability to be born in a good position."

~~~
zapita
> _I much prefer the model where the mode of competition is economic benefit
> rather than "ability to be born in a good position_”

Great! I also support economic competition as well as leveling the playing
field by limiting the unfair advantages of being born in a good position.

Of course, as you probably know, social mobility is at historic lows in the
US. This means people born into wealthy families are most likely to remain
wealthy, and people born into poor families are most likely to remain poor. By
your own argument, that is a problem because it shifts competition to “ability
to be born in a good position”.

Therefore it seems that we agree after all!

Unless of course you’re not being intellectually honest and are using big
words like “economic competition” only when it supports your pre-existing
ideology.

~~~
drawnwren
You've completely changed the subject. I meant position in a literal, not
figurative, sense.

Weird accusations of intellectual dishonesty aside, we do agree on economic
mobility but that wasn't the topic at hand. Economic mobility doesn't mean
"give the most valuable apartments in the United States to the lower class so
they can live there because they don't want their lives to change."

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pascalxus
I think 19% really understates the scale of the problem. If you removed all
the subsidies and the housing subsidies and enormous programs, I would
imagine, that number would be even higher.

I really wish they would go into the root causes of what's causing all this
hardship. Too often, these articles don't cover the real causes and just cause
knee-jerk emotional reactions. Without knowing the true cause, we can never
address the real problem: An imbalance between the number of jobs and the
housing availability. Either housing supply has to increase or all those
FB/Google employers bringing in employees from out of the state and outside
the US, need to stop doing that in areas that don't want to grow.

The hardships we face here in CA are all self imposed. Voters and their
politicians enacted each and every single regulation that's prevented housing
from being built over the last 50 years. It doesn't have to be this way. There
are other places that grow just as quickly and don't have these problems:
Houston, Dallas, Austin. Austin's already getting worse due to all the anti-
housing folks moving there (ironically whilst escaping CA housing problems).
Chicago has over 2 million residents, with great housing and very little
government intervention/regulations. CA can learn a lot from those states and
cities.

~~~
mancerayder
_Either housing supply has to increase or all those FB /Google employers
bringing in employees from out of the state and outside the US, need to stop
doing that in areas that don't want to grow._

How are areas to make this determination? By democratic vote? At what level,
the almost invisible local electorate? Maybe I'm cynical about the level of
corruption in local politics here in NY, but call me skeptical.

And what communities don't want new jobs to materialize? It brings infusions
of cash, even if housing demand goes crazy as a consequence. A depressed
housing market, if you remember the landscape in 2008, caused a lot of strife.

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curtis
> _Accounting for housing costs, California has nation’s highest poverty rate_

I assume that the underlying study breaks the population down into quintiles
or deciles based on income and then looks at spending on housing for each
group, but it's not clear from the article.

If you simply compare average income to average housing costs you're going to
get a skewed result. A software engineer living in the Bay Area could be well
over the national average for housing (40% or 50% of income, maybe more in
some cases) but they're definitely not contributing to an increased poverty
level.

Another way of looking at this is that California's poorest counties are in
the Central Valley. I suspect this is also where California's cheapest real
estate is at.

~~~
lucb1e
Good point. To elaborate on it:

> If you simply compare average income to average housing costs you're going
> to get a skewed result.

Particularly because averages give skewed results given outliers, which there
surely must be. (Particularly with wages, I imagine, someone can be _hugely_
overpaid (like 1M vs. 100k), but you can hardly be 900k underpaid because then
you'd be making negative money.) The median value makes more sense when one
does not want to be affected as much by outliers.

Not that comparing the median housing price to the median income is
necessarily a correct or complete view; I just noticed that we're talking
about averages which are even worse for this purpose.

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RobAtticus
California is the highest state; DC is the highest of the regions listed at
20.2% vs California's 19% [2].

Also interesting to note that the rate in California has been dropping over
the past few years - 20.6% avg for 2013/2014/2015 [0], 20.4% for 2016 [1], and
19% for 2017. The national supplemental poverty rate is relatively flat over
the same time frame -- 14.3% in 2015 and 13.9% in 2017

[0]
[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-258.pdf)

[1]
[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-261.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-265.pdf)

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swingline-747
Might be right. I chose to live in a Vanagon Westfalia rather than pay the
extortion rates for Valley rent. Single-family homes far from employment are
around $1M. In other states, such homes go for $90-300k. This implies around
90% of the value is in the land.

Basically, if you're not actively working in tech or servicing tech companies,
it doesn't make any sense to remain in the Valley. On retirement, definitely
also move somewhere else because it's a pay-to-play game.

~~~
mschuster91
> Basically, if you're not actively working in tech or servicing tech
> companies, it doesn't make any sense to remain in the Valley.

From a game theory perspective, certainly not. The danger is: what happens
when all the tech employees suddenly don't have any Uber drivers, any
paramedics, any supermarket vendors, hell any cleaning personnel any more?
When their homes get raided by criminals because cops cannot afford living in
SV any more? When their kids have nowhere to go to school?

That's the thing why the Free Market does not work for basic human
necessities. If the Free Market would do its job Walmart and Amazon employees
wouldn't be forced to top their "wages" up with food stamps and other social
benefits.

~~~
manfredo
The free market handles these factors just fine. If Uber can't find any
drivers in the bay area they'll up their prices and pay drivers more. If
municipalities can't find people to provide government services, they'll
increase wages. That's why BART janitors pull six figures.

~~~
mschuster91
> The free market handles these factors just fine.

Then do tell me why companies like Amazon and Walmart get away with,
essentially, state subsidies for their employees and why in many parts of the
US teachers complain about being massively underfunded, to the point of
Oklahoma switching to 4-day school days so teachers can work on the side to
earn money?!

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manfredo
Amazon and Walmart don't receive subsidies. Their workers receive subsidies.
You may be tempted to ask, "why don't we make Amazon and Walmart pay wages
that put workers above the poverty line?" The likely answer is that this would
put the companies at a competitive disadvantage and they would end up laying
off much of their workforce to stay in business. And now the government is
paying an even bigger unemployment subsidy to these former workers.

As for Oklahoma, that's the voters making the decision that cutting school
hours is a better choice than to increase teacher spending. Sure you and I
don't agree with this choice, but elections say Oklahoma voters do.

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GW150914
To paraphrase Morty, “That sounds like getting subsidies with extra steps.”

~~~
manfredo
Then let me spell it out more explicitly. Some company pays their employees
$10 an hour. This isn't enough to get by on, so the government give each of
them an extra $2 an hour to spend on necessities (I know, most welfare systems
don't pay out hourly just bear with this example). Who is helped by this extra
money? Not the company. If you cut the welfare, the company's profits (or
losses) remain exactly the same. Their workers will lead worse lives and
experience greater hardship. The workers don't find other jobs. If better
paying jobs existed they would have taken them already. Thus, it's not a
subsidy for the company. It's a subsidy for the worker. Eliminating welfare
has zero impact on the company's profits.

This is why making companies pay tax penalties if their workers are on food
stamps is a terrible ides. It'd make employers more wary of recipients of
welfare, thus making it even harder for poorer minorities, single mothers,
etc. to find jobs. And not to mention, it'd create further incentive to
outsource or automate these jobs.

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rasz
oh, the joys of traveling thru real life tent city on your way to Comic-
Con/E3, real culture shock to people from Europe.

~~~
interknot
Presumably attendees from Calais or Paris experienced slightly less culture
shock.

