San Francisco: America's largest gated community

Rather than allow for more housing development, California’s political class has embraced the campaign to raise the minimum wage. The statewide minimum wage is already set to increase to $10 by July 2016, and labor activists have been pushing to raise it higher still. Not to be outdone by Seattle, Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, has called for a $15 minimum wage for local workers to be put in place by July 2018. Whether or not minimum wage hikes are the best way to raise incomes (I tend to agree with Slate’s Jordan Weissmann on this issue), it’s worth noting that according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, you’d need to earn $29.83 an hour to afford a market-rate one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, or roughly twice Mayor Lee’s proposed minimum wage. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of minimum-wage increases will generally accept that you’d price some workers out of the labor market at a wage floor twice as high as Seattle’s. Relying solely on minimum wage hikes to make San Francisco housing affordable for local workers will ultimately mean driving all workers who can’t command a high wage out of the local labor market. Does that sound like much of a solution to you?