ast week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Raise the Wage Act, a bill that would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and finally fulfill the key demand of a movement that started with a fast-food workers’ strike in New York City in
2012. If enacted, the bill would more than double the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. According to the House Education and Labor Committee, it would also raise wages for around 32 million workers, roughly a fifth of the American workforce, and lift 1.3 million people out of poverty.
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seems this $15 number was negotiated years ago
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/research-15-minimum-wage-affordable-housing-crisis_______________________________________________
Most debates about America’s affordable-housing shortage revolve around policies aimed at increasing the supply and reducing the cost of housing, from upzoning urban land to requiring affordable units in market-rate projects, expanding housing choice vouchers, and spending more money on new affordable-housing construction. But part of the affordable-housing problem, especially in places with relatively lower-cost housing markets, is that renters just don’t have enough money, as some have argued. Could a minimum-wage increase be an effective affordable-housing policy? Or would landlords simply increase rents to adjust to tenants having more income?
Two recent papers explore the question. For a forthcoming article in the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics, Atsushi Yamagishi, a Ph.D. student in the Princeton University Department of Economics, studied the impact of a 2007 minimum-wage law revision in Japan. Looking at regional variations in wage and rent increases, and differences in rent increases between older and newer apartments, Yamagishi estimated that a 10% increase in minimum wages induced a 2.5% to 4.5% increase in housing rents in urban areas. The research suggests that minimum-wage increases benefit workers, but also their landlords, Yamagishi tells Next City.
