“renters don’t need mortgages.”
Landlords still verify income.
You don’t need high income to have good credit. Just good decision making and an understanding of how to get good credit.
I have never ever had a landlord check my income. They use credit checks in place of that, assuming from good credit scores that you know enough not to get yourself in over your head.
The only way your arguments work is if there were suddenly 200k jobs that came out of no where and landed in the middle of no where and caused a city to spring up around the employer. That doesn’t really happen here much - maybe a couple times a decade when someone like Amazon or Apple decide to build a new HQ somewhere new. Outside of that, my assertion that supply and demand cause both cost of living to increase and wages to increase is simple economics and is going to be correct in 99% of the cases you would think of.