This is kinda true, but leaves out the part that it is very hard to just move to the Midwest if you are poor in an expensive big city. First, you have to gather enough money to actually move. You will need a car and gas, and/or a moving truck. You will need first and last months rent (not to mention how will you find a cheap place in a city you have no connections in without being there?)
Then, you are leaving your entire support system when you move. When you are poor, your support system is how you live. Friends watch each other's kids while they work, they share needed things, they find jobs for each other, they lend money to each other when unexpected things happen, they let people crash on their couch when they lose their house.
Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.
> You will need a car and gas, and/or a moving truck.
Or a bus/Amtrak ticket, and some money to ship your stuff. This is me, twice. It's not that expensive. It's not even painful. It's normal - what most people do.
> You will need first and last months rent (not to mention how will you find a cheap place in a city you have no connections in without being there?)
I have never paid first and last month's rent for deposit. Having dabbled in real estate, I do know this is a thing and not that unusual. I also know this is not the norm. I've often paid deposits of amounts like $200. These are decent apartments - not crap ones, but not high end ones either. I remember the one time someone asked more than one month's rent, I simply found a comparable apartment a few blocks away. It didn't require much of a search because probably over 80% of the apartment complexes in that neighborhood did not charge that much.
As for finding a "cheap" place, all it takes is the Internet.
> Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.
Both having done this, and seeing others do this from the now expensive place I live in: I can assure you the success stories outnumber the fail stories 10 to 1. Easily. Your support system in the expensive city is not much use if you cannot afford to pay rent. Your argument has validity if you're moving between comparable cities, but we're talking about people who are, in a sense, already below 0. The baseline sucks, despite whatever social support they have.
Of course, if you're starting with $0 in hand, you're screwed no matter where you are. Barring medical expenses or similar sudden expenses, most people who end up there do so via the boiling frog syndrome. The trick is to get out when you see that your finances are dropping.
You say $200 like that's an amount of money that a person living in poverty could conceivably accumulate. I think you're massively underestimating the degree of economic despair that is present in parts of this country. Also, you don't mention kids anywhere - regardless of how responsible it was to have them in the first place, they're here now.
> Also, many poor people aren't starting with $0... they are starting with negative money
This was addressed in my comment - although perhaps I added that portion in while you were typing yours.
> You leave out having kids, and the childcare support that is needed if you can't afford daycare.
Definitely. There are many subtopics in this thread and my intention was to focus on only one, which was the expense to move to a cheaper city. With children, it's a lot more expensive, but to be frank, as per the original comment in this thread - you couldn't afford to live on minimum wage with dependents even in the 90's - that aspect has not changed and only gotten worse.
I was referring to a single person with no debt and a small amount of cash.
To be clear, I'm not saying anyone who is poor can get out of it easily (or even at all). I'm saying some definitely can. Nor am I saying there aren't institutional problems that make it harder for people and easier to get into debt (predatory advertising and loans, for example - heck - the whole credit system). In many ways being poor in the US is worse than in many/most developed countries. I acknowledge that.
But there's a difference between a bad situation and an impossible one.
I merely want to push back on a sentiment I see often on HN and other places (and usually only by people earning good amounts of money) that it's a bad idea or incredibly difficult to leave a coastal city to move to a cheap one and do better there than here. I see it time and again on these threads, and for me it's a huge cognitive dissonance, as I've lived in both places, and have encountered several people in both places who made the move. It's not easy, but as I said, the success cases far outnumber the failed ones.
The last set of people I know who moved from my city to a cheaper one were low income workers (cooks in a restaurant who were treated poorly). They had families with kids - some did not have a working spouse. They saw cheap houses in Ohio (under $100K) and immediately made the move. Granted, they're now living in shitty neighborhoods (the only place you'll find such houses), but they have positive cash flow. And now that they're successful, their so called social support they had here is now considering making that move as well.
My scenario in my original comment was about getting a decent apartment. I've seen people come in to the cheaper city I lived in with not enough cash to make any kind of deposit. Yet most were still successful in the long run. The exceptions were people with some kind of chronic problem: Drugs, health issues, crime related issues, behavioral issues (can't handle bosses) etc. They'd usually find some charity/religious institution who would provide them a roof for a fixed period of time and in that time they'd find a job and then move out to a real apartment. Most of these cities will have places that will rent you a room for fairly cheap. Crappy neighborhood, etc.
The contrast is with staying in an expensive city where no matter what they do they will not get positive cash flow. Whatever your views on the topic, keep this one fact in mind: The baseline we are comparing against is staying in a city with negative cash flow.
> To be clear, I'm not saying anyone who is poor can get out of it easily (or even at all). I'm saying some definitely can.
I was not disagreeing that SOME people can move. I am saying that it isn't blanket advice that you can give to every poor person living in a big city.
My main issue is that the advice to 'move somewhere cheaper' is often used as a way to dismiss the seriousness of poverty, that all it takes is some personal decisions and you won't be poor anymore. In other words, it is poor people's fault for being poor (because they choose to live in an expensive city).
Yes, there are lots of techniques that many individuals can use to improve their personal situation. However, that doesn't mean that we have solved the societal issues that are leading to widespread poverty.
You are making very general statements and treating them as if they apply to the entire homeless population. If you have an interest in fixing problems you should appreciate that people's circumstances vary and so will solutions. The parent's solution will work for many people in poverty: most poor people are young, and most young people do not have children, so moving to a cheaper locale is in fact viable for many homeless. Also, you don't necessarily have to up and leave everything you know; living an hour from the city is often sufficient.
There are some places you can go to college while working a part time minimum wage job during the school year and full time in the summer and graduate with only a few thousand dollars of debt while paying all your expenses.
Just because an expensive new car is very expensive does not mean that a vehicle is out of reach of everyone who can't afford an expensive new vehicle.
The market will only adjust wages if people are behaving rationally. Staying in a very expensive place with low wages breaks the market because it isn't rational behavior.
Some of the most desperate people I know are ones who grew up poor in a HCOL city (NYC, London, etc.) and who fell into low wage jobs.
At the same time as supporting the cities they live in doing all of the most fundamental work (cooking, cleaning, etc) they are regularly disrespected and told to fuck off somewhere else if they're struggling - away from the support network they rely upon and the friends and family who give their life meaning.
And yeah, some of them did move away but that sometimes made things worse because even though they might be financially slightly better situated in a different city, they didn't have a support network there.
Expensive housing is a political choice. Watering down the minimum wage was a political choice. These people falling through the cracks and suffering was the outcome of those deliberate choices to prioritize pumping up asset prices and profit margins over actual people.
Most people don't quite understand how homelessness works, and it's because of this whole "support network" thing. In most people's mind, homeless = bum living in a cardboard box. What actually happens in reality is someone falls on hard times and they move in with a relative, or bum a room from a friend, or etc, etc. That's what keeps them out of the cardboard box, and keeps them fed.
And that's why they're shit scared to move. Move, and all those friends and family can't help you. Even scarier, move, and you're probably scared the whole friends-and-family ties might get weaker - most people are always paranoid about whether their friends/lovers/etc still care about them, so they stay close to make sure they're "tending the fire" and keeping the friendship alive. It's human.
It is known that the FSP is holy, for it shall cure all our ails with nary a lift of our clicky fingers. /snark.
The market is us. We will adjust wages if people are behaving rationally - but people don't. The market isn't some external, independently existing force; it's observations about our collective actions. We're the market. It's weird (to me) every time that term is used that way.
> it isn't rational behavior
Of course not, people aren't rational, but even if they were, you'd still be (generally) incorrect. People coming to decisions that are against your expectations is much more commonly about your lack of visibility into other forces and information than it is about their cognitive processing.
Last car I bought cost about $3000. Cost of insurance? Over half that, annually. More expensive if you do a monthly payment plan. And that's with a spotless driving record and favorable demographics.
And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y, not including gas.
Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.
> Last car I bought cost about $3000. Cost of insurance? Over half that, annually.
How bad is your driving record, and are you getting anything beyond liability? I have paid about that much, for 2 cars, and I have a lot more than liability. Even now, for 2 cars I'm paying under $1300/year - and have more than liability coverage. When I paid the bare minimum, for 1 car, the most I paid is $600/year. Even adjusting for inflation, it would not amount to over $1000/year today. And I paid that only for 1-2 years while building enough of a driving record. Looking at my financial records, when I had just liability on an old car, I typically paid $350/year.
> More expensive if you do a monthly payment plan.
Not all plans are like this. For the last few years I've been on a plan that costs the same whether I do monthly or annual. Shop around.
> And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y
First, if you paid $3000 for a 30 year old car, it's a bad deal. 2 years ago I bought a 15 year of Honda Accord for $3500, and it did not have a lot of miles. Second, if you're paying $3000/year for maintenance, you bought a bad car. Sell it and get a reliable car. As an example, I paid $350 this year for maintaining my car (including oil changes). I paid about $1100 last year. Looking at my prior old car, I've gone as low as $100/year. In fact, looking back at almost 10 years, that $1100 was the most I've ever paid for maintaining an old car.
> Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.
Good cheap cars are always cheaper than the alternatives. Always.
There definitely is a cost associated with moving to a place where the skills you have are valued enough to support yourself. If the pain of changing is greater than the pain of staying where you are, then it is completely rational to stay where you are.
As a personal anecdote, I'm a college student who started at community college, worked during the summers, and even worked during the semester at jobs paying over $15/hr. Despite all of that, despite rarely if ever spending any money on "fun" things, I'm $30,000 in debt. Tuition and rent are just that expensive now. It's almost impossible to save up when you're throwing just about every dollar you're making just to keep yourself afloat.
My local community college costs about $11k per year. That includes room, board, books, tuition, and $4,000 of personal expenses for transportation, etc. The closest university is about $16k for everything except personal expenses, so let's add $4k to that to get to $20k (probably a bit high, but we'll use it to use).
So that would come to:
$11k
$11k
$20k
$20k
-----
$62k
The $16k we budgeted for personal expenses is probably a bit high and I living on campus is much more expensive than other options, but at $15 per hour, you'd only need to work half time to cover all your expenses.
So lets say you work 20 hours a week for 39 weeks during the school year and 40 hours for 13 during the summer. That is 1,300 hours per year. You need to bring in $11.9 per hour to cover your expenses without being particularly frugal. If you live at home, live off campus and cook your own food, graduate a semester early, etc. you can drop your costs down by quite a bit.
For students who did ok in highschool (3.5 GPA, 29 on ACT) the university will give you at least a $2k scholarship. Pell grants will give you up to $5k that you don't need to pay back depending on your financial need. Graduating debt free is very VERY doable.
I’m certainly not arguing that rising inequality isn’t a bad thing, but your comment wasn’t about this guy, it was about Americans at large. Contrary to popular coastal belief, fly-over country actually has people, and culture, and life. The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.
It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.
Forty five million people live in the NYC and LA metro areas alone. NYC is about 3% of the national population. Los Angeles is another 2.5%.
The average American lives in a fairly considerable city, depending on your definition of "large." The vast majority live in cities of 100,000 or more.
Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs. For perspective, the #100 MSA is Fort Wayne, Indiana, at roughly 500,000 people.
Not to mention, struggling to make rent, homelessness, and poverty don't just vanish when you step away from the most expensive cities.
Living in "Santa Luna" (which I assume was actually Santa Cruz) instead of the suburbs where he worked didn't make his rent affordable in 1994, and it certainly wouldn't today, in 2020.
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing for. I didn’t say anything of those things were non-problems, I said that having a minimum wage job isn’t some kind of homeless death sentence.
It is completely possible to survive on a minimum wage job in many cities across the country. It isn’t luxurious, it isn’t fair, and it certainty isn’t ideal, but exaggerating the facts to make a sociopolitical point only makes the opposition have a stronger foothold.
I think it's very plain that holding a minimum wage job implies a tenuous ability to house and feed oneself in much of the country. It is not a complex thesis.
I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people
"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."
Demographic shifts are weird, man.
I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.
I’m not seeing where ‘urban area’ is defined in that document. I imagine it includes basically any town or city. The original issue was NYC/LA/SF vs. the rest of the country, not urban vs. rural. Plenty of college towns, for example, likely qualify as urban yet are extremely affordable.
It's worth noting that the Bay area, the entire metropolitan area, is about the size of Detroit. It's about a quarter the size of Los Angeles or New York.
It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.
Well, "the rest" is a long tail of areas with between 100,000 and 500,000 people. Very few Americans live or work outside an urban area, and a very large fraction live in the largest urban areas.
Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.
>> It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.
I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm an EU citizen and have never lived in the USA, but I am curious to know: have you, yourself, done this (what you say is absolutely possible)?
Yes, absolutely. During and after college (4 year university), I worked at a bakery in a fairly major Midwestern city. For working ~45 hours a week, I made roughly $1,200 after taxes. One room in a 2-bedroom apartment was $350, leaving me with about $850 for everything else. Definitely enough for cheap beer, groceries at Aldi, and other budget entertainment.
It certainly wasn't a luxurious lifestyle and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, but it also wasn't much different than living in a dorm at college...or even the startup lifestyle, seeing that this is HN. Absolutely doable for a young person (as the original link is about) and not a straight ticket to homelessness.
For what it's worth, I also spent quite a bit of time traveling around Europe and had many art student friends living on half as much money in smaller cities in France, Germany, etc.
Thank you for replying. I live in the EU and indeed wages are lower, but of course prices are also lower.
When I was 16, I worked at a bakery too, as an apprentice. I made a pittance and lived in a squat because I couldn't afford rent, but I enjoyed the work and I could eat of the produce to my heart's content (I have a big heart). This was in Athens, Greece, btw.
On the other hand, neither I nor you had a family at the time we worked such low-pay jobs and I suspect that a minimum wage job would not be sufficient for two adults wanting to start a family.
This guy's story doesn't track, for so many reasons, but I'm gonna stick to the basics
1.) median wage in America for ALL workers is around $28k a year -- meaning this guy was, supposedly on his "minimum wage" job, earning more than fully half of all Americans. Think about that. He was in the upper half of the income distribution, on "minimum wage" ? really?
(A typical minimum wage job pays $10k a year BEFORE taxes -- 28 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, $7.25 an hour. It is extremely rare for low wage employers to allow an employee to work more than 29 hours a week, as it may oblige them to offer benefits at the 30 hour mark, and extra pay at the 40 hour mark.)
2. There is not a single state in the union where median rents are as low as he describes -- did he just rent the very cheapest room in the entire 50 states?
Americans love telling each other stories about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but they also love to omit the details of how they got things like 45 hours a week, or made more than 50% of American workers, despite working for a "minimum wage," or got paid time and a half on his "minimum wage" job, or found housing near a job center at below the median cost for even the most rural and blighted parts of the country.
All of these, individually, are staggeringly unlikely. Together, they come off as the luckiest man alive. It seems impossible unless he was working in his uncle's bakery and living in his brother's apartment.
(The refreshing thing about this comic is that the author didn't blow smoke up our asses about "bootstraps," it's very plain he felt lucky to escape his situation.)
I have not done this myself, but 2-3 of my friends are doing this currently in the midwest. One is working at a warehouse; one is working at a major home improvement store; and one is doing part time work which effectively amounts to minimum wage. Like the GP stated in his other post, their lifestyles aren't fantastic and they definitely are constrained in their spending, but they are hardly living in squalor: they have adequate, safe, reliable housing; they have functional vehicles; they have health insurance; they don't go hungry; they take driving trips; they come out to our group events and bring their own booze; and they are not in danger of becoming homeless. There is a huge delta between solidly middle class / upper middle class and poor / precarious or homeless which doesn't seem to be acknowledged.
Ahh, yes, but don't you know that if you don't live in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, or New York you can't do anything and nothing happens? You have to live in one of those four cities. /sarcasm
We are discussing a memoir of a man's life working in the Bay area and living just outside the same.
This memoir was not about Topeka, Kansas. Not that struggling to make rent doesn't happen in Topeka. Not that Topeka isn't filled with people living vibrant lives.
Just, this particular story occurred in the Bay area.
Source: myself, after college, working at a bakery in a Midwestern city.