[johnnylambada]

I imagine they’re all gone now. A great example of the free market creating a niche product that was useful and affordable to its customers and the government regulating it out of existence. I’m sure there were abuses by owners but the system worked for the majority.

[delichon]

If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? If you can't land a job at minimum wage, better for you to be unemployed? I wish that these were reductio ad absurdems rather than common place luxury beliefs.

[user3939382]

It’s a lose lose. If you remove the wage floor many people with “livable” wages now would have theirs cut, it’s a problem of adversarial incentives a la nash.

[bccdee]

The market for labour is a monopsony (the limited number of buyers relative to sellers make it a buyer's market). Just as suppressing price in a monopolistic market is unlikely to drive down supply and can actually increase overall sales, recent minimum wage increases have been found to have a net positive effect on employment.

> We present the first causal analysis of recent large minimum wage increases, focusing on 47 large U.S. counties that reached $15 or more by 2022q1. [...] We then find significant and larger positive employment effects, as the monopsony model predicts. We go on to document the presence of monopsony in the restau- rant industry. [...] The fast food industry’s monopsony power allowed it to accommodate large minimum wage increases and raise employment.

Source: https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Minimum...

[HDThoreaun]

Less than 1% of workers make minimum wage. There are effectively zero opportunities to increase employment by offering wages below the minimum. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.

[ggfdh]

I'm not sure what standards you're talking about, but if you can't afford a home where you live you should move to a cheaper area. If the decision is being homeless vs moving, you should move.

[gosub100]

How about "if you are unwilling pay someone enough to cover most of their core expenses, you aren't allowed to hire them at all"? I like that phrasing better

[jhbadger]

Yeah, the main flophouse discussed in the article (White House) closed in 2014 and is now a "boutique" hotel serving a very different set of clients

[bilbo0s]

Hate to be “that guy”, but this isn’t regulation or government. Rather it’s the free market with actors willing to do anything to make gentrification profits. Which are, unfortunately for our society, quite sizable.

You can have flophouses. Officially or under the table. But you can’t have them in areas with the vultures circling so to speak.

Not saying gentrification is good or bad. Just saying, if gentrification profits are there to be had, it’s a bit foolish to expect people to not do whatever it takes to secure those profits.

[IncreasePosts]

Affordable is a stretch. When they went out of business in 2014, they were charging $30/night - $900/mo. You could definitely get actual rooms in NY or even a studio apartment for that much. Yes, it will be way out in the Bronx or Queens, in not a great neighborhood, but it is certainly better than a 4x6' room with a plank in it and just a knee wall between you and a number of strangers. Obviously for a lot of people coming up with $900 at once for a deposit or whatever could be the hard part, but these rooms were more of the equivalent of pay day loans than an actual value.

[jollyllama]

Perhaps they entered a price-increase death spiral as they were saddled with free-riders as the operator in TFA says.