Posted on 07/30/2019 11:05:25 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
Many retail employees are having a hard time making ends meet. Leftists have proposed raising wages to $15/hour, and sometimes have done so, but such wages are unrealistically expensive for most retail employers.
If retail stores had restricted occupancy apartments above their selling floor, retail employees could live in these and not need to pay for a car and liability insurance. Residential restricted occupancy is sometimes found in English agricultural regions to keep housing affordable for people working in agriculture.
Retail store residency would have additional benefits of reducing road congestion and CO2 emissions, increasing employee reliability, the amount of employee free time and the number of people able to live in an metropolitan area without overcrowding its roads.
Employees might get paid $4/hour plus usage of the apartment plus $.01/hour for each square foot of their apartment less than 600.
In some cases there might be sliding wall system in an apartment to make for either one large bedroom or two small bedrooms.
To fund adequate Social Security benefits for the employee, an added $1/hour FICA tax might be levied on the employee.
The apartment might be valued at $700/month for income taxation, welfare and health insurance subsidy purposes.
There might be a 10-day grace period to live in the apartment after quitting or getting fired from a job. There might also be a waiting period of up to 10 days to move into such an apartment.
Whether or not specific apartments are employer furnished and their exact size would be left to employment market forces.
Employees not needing or currently getting an employer apartment would simply work for the usual wages and benefits.
Excess retail store apartments might made available to nearby restaurants and their employees on a similar basis.
Even better than cruise ships may be large yachts. Yes, the pay may not be as great but getting responsibility (and advancement) looks like it should be easier and it may easier to drift from berth to berth, till you find owners who are cool.
I’d rather be the uber cool owner though....
I should add that most of the apartments will soon be new or nearly new.
Ah yes, progress being government taking your Liberty and selling it back to you with strings attached.
If by boost you mean bus around....
“Look up the town of Pullman in Illinois.”
There may be legal issues, but there are many retailers in a town, but there was only one Pullman Company.
George Pullman cut the wages of his men but kept company rents high.
There are no cash rents workers pay under my proposal.
My proposal uses an at-will arrangement, with a 10-day grace period under state law or contract for the apartment.
Everyone who has a mansion has to rent out their spare rooms at low income housing level prices.
I'm sure the wealthy dems will be happy to help the less fortunate. And they will be helping the earth too, by making use of those extra rooms.
And I'm sure they won't mind paying for some health insurance and medical bills, and perhaps a college education, for their tenants too.
After all, this is what they want Americans to do, so they can lead by example.
Soooo—IF I am the employer, IF I FIRE that employee——does the replacement employee get the apartment above the retail outlet???
I lived in Madison & Milwaukee both for many years.
It was COMMON for a retail store to be on the ground floor & the family that owned the business lived on the 2nd & 3rd floors. Particularly local taverns.
Virtually every big box store is nothing but a high ceiling warehouse........
You really never thought this thru did you?...LOL!
This is how China operates.
In most places in most cities I am familiar with, the retail shop owner is most often not the owner of the space they occupy. And when such spaces do have apartments above them they too are leased by the owner of the building, not the shop owner.
To achieve what you speak of apartments above a shop would need to be owned by the shopkeeper themself, and NOT leasing those apartments would need to not be a financial burden to the shopowner/building owner. I do not think that is the situation you would usually find.
What are you going to do, have the federal government buy all the space now rented to small shopkeepers, sell it back to the shopkeepers at a loss, so they can afford to give away the apartments above the shop to their employees?
Utopian ideas are often not really utopian and not really practical.
Sounds like Redmond or possibly Kirkland
Issaquah actually
Yeah I can see that. Though of the Eastside cities in terms of swallowing the agenda i’d probably put Redmond at #1
No he did not, begining with building and code requirements for ‘live loads’. I smell unicorn farts.
I live in DC metro area and see stuff like around so don’t think there’s a legal problem stopping it. IRS also already has their ways of dealing w/imputed income, even for rental rates below fair market value.
I still can’t get past my original question. Forget the discounts, if an employee is worth 15 an hour, you’re basically renting to someone who can afford 750 a month in rent (going off 30% income).
In the area that the successful business is likely to be, there is also likely other places of employ nearby where those individuals would be willing to pay more, e.g. a 60k a year guy could go up to 1500 per month.
As such the market would drive the rates up and it would not be worth it to rent to the burger flipper. You’re still saving a commute (the 60k guy is now closer to their office).
The Chinese have been doing that for several millenniums.
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