If I'm single and childless and make $15/hour [View all]

[Recursion]

in most of the country except the absolute most expensive urban cores I'd be doing pretty well. I could rent a studio or a 1BR in most "normal" markets and have some beer money left over.

If I'm a single parent of 2 children, $15/hour is going to be hard to live on. For one thing, I'd need to rent a three bedroom apartment, and $15/hour is not going to be enough for that.

So should the minimum wage be higher, enough to rent a 3 bedroom apartment? But then the single childless person would be able to afford a 3 bedroom apartment, and would probably like the extra space. We don't have enough 3 bedroom apartments built, so the single parent gets priced out.

Should only people with children get the higher minimum wage? That seems problematic too, both because nobody will want to hire people with children if they cost more, and because the politics are going to be just awful particularly when race comes into play.

Should childless people be restricted from renting multiple-bedroom apartments? This is what a lot of central Europe does; you can't just "rent an apartment", there's a housing board and you have to justify that you're using it to capacity.

I don't know the answer I just think by focusing simply on wages we're only looking at one part of the problem. Elizabeth Warren wrote about this in her book "The Two Income Trap", and I don't really know that there's a solution: if e.g. childless couples and couples with children are bidding on the same housing stock, then everybody household is going to wind up having to have both parents working because the price gets bid up.