Downtown LA’s vacancy rate is 12%, which is the highest it’s been since 2000 and triple the overall rate for LA – and downtown LA is also the site of LA’s skid row, whose population surged by 20% last year, thanks to a dramatic increase in homelessness among veterans and under-24s.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in DTLA is $2,500.
The justification for markets is efficient allocations of scarce resources. Market failures are always problematic, but when markets fail over foundational services and goods necessary for survival – food, shelter, water, health care – they indict themselves as literally unfit for human survival.
According to my Dad the Republican™, people who want the minimum wage raised “don’t understand what it’s for” and that the businesses he worked for when he was younger would have had to change their entire business model to accommodate it so I just wanna say, controversial opinion here apparently, but if your business can’t afford to pay its employees a living wage it’s because uhh your current business model ain’t worth shit. Lol
That last part of the OP’s statement is actually the reasoning behind why the minimum wage was established. The companies and corporations of the day levied the same argument back then, that their companies couldn’t survive while paying a minimum wage. This is what FDR said in response:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.
Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you – using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”
(1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act, and
1938, Fireside Chat, the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards Act that instituted the federal minimum wage)
“America likes to brand itself as “the land of opportunity,” but from elsewhere in the world, the cost of that opportunity is shockingly high. It looks more and more like the land of oligarchy, where those with privilege move higher and higher up more and more easily, and those below have to scramble with all their might, sacrificing everything and never making a bad decision to even have a shot at being upper middle class. And if you don’t get there? Well you shouldn’t have made that bad decision that one time, it’s your fault. Christ, even your poster boys for innovation and striking it rich—Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates—went to freaking Harvard. Land of opportunity, huh? Yeah, when the next Facebook is founded by a guy working out of a college dorm at Indiana State, you might be able to say that without irony.”
Of the five Republican debates and of the three Democratic debates, not one moderator has askeda question involving the words “poverty” or “poor.” While the subject has been touched upon by some of the Democratic candidates, namely Bernie Sanders and briefly Jim Webb, the topic has been entirely unmentioned by the moderators during the three Democratic debates. In the GOP debates, the candidates only bring up the topic as a way to swipe President Obama, which is fair enough but is not a discussion of poverty much less a good-faith attempt to mitigate it. By comparison, the Democratic debate moderators brought up “ISIS” or “Terrorism” 21 times total in all three debates.
A recent study in The Intercept found poverty’s non-status on television isn’t just limited to the debates. Cable news was over 20 times more likely to mention ISIS or terrorism than poverty during the heart of primary season in late 2014.
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