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With new ordinance, Santa Fe becomes first city to tie minimum wage to rental costs
(www.abqjournal.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Much as I like this idea, it feels like this may backfire badly. They'd be better off doing things that would reduce the cost of housing, like building more housing.
Building more housing only reduces the cost of housing if you don't allow all of it to be turned into air bnbs. We need to modernize zoning laws.
The air bnb issue is the real problem, if they banned air bnb in santa fe it only can benefit the city
It's not air BNB itself that's the issue. I don't see much problem if you have a second house through inheritance or whatever you rent it out. I think the bigger problem we are facing is corporate landlords, limiting personal and corporate ability to own more than a few properties would solve more issues.
A major part of it is not just corporate ownership, but also lack of supply of condos as an alternative to houses. Pushes houses prices up. Pushes rent up because people don't have any options to compete with apartment rents
This is a really good thing, it just doesn't go far enough.
If minimum wage is tied to cost of living it reduces the incentive to price gouge.
Which is something Santa Fe is in particular need of, since they have an extremely restrictive ordinance on housing development.
Small business and franchises will be unable to afford more employees. Lemmy thinks these business owners are all rich. No, they can't just hire more people.
Dug around one night looking at McDonald's and franchising. You can expect a meager $50K your first year, $90K after that. No way in hell I'm putting in the hours and hassle of running a business, with a couple of dozen employees to care for, when I was making $83K sitting at home playing sysadmin. BTW, that $90K doesn't include accounting and payroll, you on your own.
Min wage here is $15, so the employer cost is likely around $22. Even if the owner takes $0 pay, they could hire a whopping 2 employees.
Landlords will jack the rates knowing that their renters will make more and more money. This law funnels money from Main Street to corporate landlords. They're punishing the good guys, incentivizing the bad guys, and minimum wage employees get squeezed from both ends.
SOURCE: Was a sysadmin for a payroll firm and was deeply involved in all aspects of the business. Most of our clients were not well off and paid minimum wage or close enough.
EDIT: Forgot to add; This is a revenue neutral law for the city. If they want more housing that's money out of the budget or tax incentives to builders, so less budget next year. Probably worth the temporary lower budget to get the community thriving and able to pay taxes. No idea on all that. 🤷🏻
That's one of the many reasons why most people never started McDonald's franchise and instead leave it to conglomerates.
For instance, with McDonald's, all of the buildings are owned by McDonald's, so you're renting the building from them, you're paying them the franchise fee, and you're ordering through their distributors.
That being said, there are many franchises you can purchase into that do not have nearly the same hurdles for income.