The problem is almost entirely that housing is too expensive.

"Living wage" is an awful term because it intrinsically holds employers responsible for real estate costs, which are strongly correlated with higher pay (read: as employees get paid more, housing costs rise to match it).

$20 an hour is not awful pay when you can rent for $600/mo. So the actual fix is to just build more housing, and it will bring back the viability of all these disappearing jobs.

Employers used to just build housing for their employees. While in some cases it lead to questionably practices, it almost seems the lesser evil today.

Employers are free to use their political capital to push against bad behaviour by landlords and NIMBYs, but they traditionally rally behind politics that favors both of those groups.

They sure have a lot of that capital.