16 ms·

A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

287 points by el_benhameen 9y ago

nxsynonym 9y ago
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages. This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.
- colek42 9y ago
  why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Don't they do this already with property and state income taxes?
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    The taxes that states and municipalities are giving them breaks on in order to lure them into the region?
  - cbhl 9y ago
    The SFMTA Commuter Shuttle Program is only allowed to recover costs of the program itself, for regulatory reasons. Locals don't actually want to fix this problem -- ethnic groups are afraid of losing their homes, because historically that's what new housing construction has done. All of SoMa was built by razing a predominantly black community and replacing it with what is there now. You can go to the SFMOMA and see photos of what it used to look like.
- wvenable 9y ago
  Yeah, someone who is 62 isn't just going to get another equivalent job close to home.
- andrewjl 9y ago
  This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    True, but new housing wouldn't be needed if there wasn't such a high influx of people moving into the Bay area. Sure tech isn't the only player in the game, but they're surely one of the biggest. If less people were moving there for high paying jobs - rent wouldn't rise as quickly or as drastically.
    - falsedan 9y ago
      > new housing wouldn't be needed Bay Area housing supply has been growing less than demand for the last 30 years. New housing is needed, regardless of who is employing whom.
      - KekDemaga 9y ago
        California building codes are pretty extreme from what I've seen, they go as far as measuring the pull force required to open a door for example. This seems like a place where a little deregulation would go a long way.
        mvid 9y ago
        That's a nice idea, but this is a region where the ground you build on is your enemy.
        falsedan 9y ago
        Counterpoint: Tokyo.
        9y ago
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago
  ...because these companies can just go somewhere else that won't pressure them, so when cities are faced with a billion dollar tech campus or none at all they often feel like they have to bend. Cities often even cut taxes to see big companies come into town. Capitalism will always win against public infrastructure.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    It's not really "winning" so much as finding an economic equilibrium (unless that's what you mean by "capitalism"). I think the problem here is the regulation that prevents the construction of new homes. If you remove that artificial barrier, housing costs could decline. Alternatively, the municipalities could tax the real estate developers who are profiting from the regulation, but if you can get that resolution to pass muster then there probably wouldn't be any regulation to begin with.
    - ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago
      good point
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ehnto 9y ago
  Would that be the purpose of property tax and state corporate taxes? Genuine question. I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    I think in theory this is how it should work - but I think part of the issue is the multi-city sprawl that's happening. When an area of influence grows that big, who is held responsible? I'm sure no one is volunteering to pick up the slack and shoulder the burden of all the improvements.
- rhizome 9y ago
  If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  There are so many misconceptions in this post... > why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people? > Lower income housing? Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started. The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs. > If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars). > move their headquarters out of the city centers? They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center. > It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages. Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    I'll admit I'm not a city planner. I don't have the answers to the problems. It's just frustrating to see what's happening with these mega-cities and how it's affecting the lives of so many people negatively. Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they? Bay area has a whole bucket of specific problems - but there are general shared trends that extend to other cities with big tech industries.
    - Analemma_ 9y ago
      > Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they? I think the answer is that with well-managed development, having boosted economies can have few or no negative aspects, but the Bay Area is sorely lacking that right now. As others have said, the lion's share of the blame is not with the tech companies (they're just hiring workers they need), but with the area's terrible NIMBY politics that are blocking the construction of more housing.
- jsonne 9y ago
  You assume that everyone working for a tech company is a 6 figure programmer. There are plenty of secretaries, social media coordinators, sales people etc. That likely make less than what a sanitation worker, cop firefighter, etc. make. It isn't so clear cut.
- wang_li 9y ago
  Just yesterday I was commenting here on this very situation, but she has already moved her home out of the city in search of less expensive rent. She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever, they can pay prices that reflect the true cost of living in the city and not some indirect subsidized price.
  - greyfox 9y ago
    or just bring your own coffee and lunch?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever ...she's a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I'm pretty sure she's not selling sandwiches.
    - wang_li 9y ago
      The same principle applies.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        How so? What do highly paid workers in the city have to do with her job?
        wang_li 9y ago
        She presumably provides a service to those in the area where she works. Whether she makes sandwiches or gives life advice, the price paid by the consumers of her service should be somewhat correlated with the cost of living in the area.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    TL;DR on my own comment: she's in her early 60s with all that entails for jobs and job hunting. She's making the best of being basically trapped.
- ianai 9y ago
  I think there's a problem of congregation. i.e. Real network effects reinforcing labor concentration - to the exclusion of support business. Companies want their employees close at hand. Those same employees attract further, similar businesses nearby. I don't know how to change that. Tele-presence doesn't seem as in demand.
- davidf18 9y ago
  The issue is the zoning density restrictions that cause and politically induced scarcity of housing -- "rent seeking" a form of market failure or market inefficiency. The fix is quite simple: rescind the zoning laws that create artificial scarcity of land which benefits wealthy landlords such as our President Trump while making renters pay far higher rents than they would in a functioning, efficient market. Since about 2001, Japan has had federal laws that overrule local laws related to zoning. The result: in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs < 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC. Get rid of the laws that create market failures, that prohibit the market from working efficiently, and you will see a big housing boom and plenty of housing. It is really that simple.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  On the other hand, I feel that she's over-compensating a little. No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way... But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").
  - rbcgerard 9y ago
    I think the answer is she's making a choice based on her preferences: 1. Live and Work in SF make $80k, and live in small expensive housing 2. Work in SF and make $80k, live in Stockton and get more and pay less for a house, and spend a ton of time commuting 3. Live and Work in Stockton, make way less, live in a place larger than SF but Smaller than #2 and not have to commute She chose #2 - others make different choices
    - spiralpolitik 9y ago
      For (3) you are of course assuming that there is a job in Stockton for her skill set. There may not be which makes option 3 an non starter.
  - ojbyrne 9y ago
    Minor note, because my thoughts were along similar lines - she was evicted from her $1600/month apt, and presumably would pay significantly more for it now.
  - OrwellianChild 9y ago
    I think it's important to acknowledge a very different set of priorities for someone in their early 60s, who is: 1) Close to retirement age 2) Likely still saving as much as possible so she can retire 3) May have other expenses not detailed in the article, stemming from family needs, health concerns, etc. Also note that a property management company is evaluating someone from the "risk of non-payment" perspective - not a financial advisor's.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Why punish companies for being successful enough to create attractive, high-paying jobs? The consequences of doing that won't be very good for anyone. A slower economy will hurt the low-income workers a bit more than the high-income workers. What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
  - 0xffff2 9y ago
    Why not punish companies for creating jobs in an already crowded area? How many attractive, high-paying jobs in SF are tied to the city by any physical necessity? If companies want to avoid being punished, all they have to do is move their offices to a less crowded city.
    - wbl 9y ago
      It isn't crowded. SF is less dense then Brooklyn. The "city" of Palo Alto could easily use a few more stories.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Crowding is the whole point of cities: get lots of people and jobs together in a small space and let them benefit from each other. If lack of crowding is more important to someone than economic opportunity, they can go live in the countryside. The benefits of centralization & economic opportunity for you but no one else isn't a stable equilibrium or a coherent policy goal. The only way you could plausibly achieve that over the long term is with border controls and immigration policy, something that's explicitly off the table for the interior of the United States per the Constitution.
    - twblalock 9y ago
      If they move to a less-crowded city, and offer good jobs there, that city will become crowded, especially when former employees leave to start other companies in the same area. That's how Silicon Valley became what it is. If a lot of tech companies moved to other cities, it would probably happen there, too.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  The same thing is happening in most other cities albeit perhaps more slowly, most of which have no particular industry to blame it on. It's a shortage caused by zoning. https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thwarting-economic-mobility-2466575966.html https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...
- ethanhunt_ 9y ago
  Why should taxpayers subsidize unsustainable prices for the restaurants/shops/services? If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
  - svachalek 9y ago
    Nah, there are much more viable market solutions. There will be 4 sandwich makers sharing that apartment, or they will commute for hours, or the sandwiches will be made somewhere else and shipped in, or the sandwich shop will make you build your own sandwich, or it will understaff and you'll have to wait 30 minutes for your sandwich...
- stillhere 9y ago
  This all falls squarely on the shoulders on landlords and their greed. Once they take a look at the applicant's tech salaries, the prices go up.
- closeparen 9y ago
  >why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization. It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years. And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?
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PopsiclePete 9y ago
So why do we keep commuting for jobs that don't really require our physical presence? It was a long hard battle for me to be able to work from home, and yes, I sometimes do miss out on face-to-face interaction, but going to the office 2 instead of 5 days a week is still a huge win - I'm not in a car out there, making traffic worse for you. You're welcome. Can we please solve the supposed "interaction" problem with some nice digital pens and white-boards and web cams and just .... work from anywhere?
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  This seems like the most logical solution. I think the issue is that the people who are impacted the most by these long commutes are workers who can't physically work remotely. The people who work for companies that could implement it, generally live close enough that the commute doesn't bother them in the first place.
- asadlionpk 9y ago
  The thing is we are not there yet. But this will eventually happen either by VR-like presence or just async style work (culture requiring less realtime interactions by design)
- boondaburrah 9y ago
  because in some cases, it's me that requires the physical presence - not the job. Working physically with the team is amazingly better for my productivity. Unfortunately, I have to take the jobs where they are. Since public transit is so bad, that's brutal commutes.
- xeromal 9y ago
  I hate working from home. I'm a social being.
  - PopsiclePete 9y ago
    Me too - which is why I still go to the office - just not 5 days a week. If we could stagger people's schedules somehow - you go on Monday, I go on Tuesday - and do that on a massive scale - it should help traffic congestion quite a bit. Or we could actually build some nice mass transit in this country. But now I'm just talking crazy.
turtlebits 9y ago
A little misleading as she needs to catch the train at 4am. Still, an almost 3 hour commute is brutal.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Misleading? Do you not include layovers in the time it takes to travel somewhere? Most people do.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    The article says she gets up at 2:15 but doesn't have to leave home until 4:00. As it's generally possible to get ready for work in less than 105 minutes, the "2:15 Alarm" bit highlighted in the headline is a little misleading.
  - sp332 9y ago
    But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. “I just can’t rush like that,” she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from leisure to precision. She could get up somewhat later to catch her train.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      Right. That's addressed later in the article.
      - mmanfrin 9y ago
        Hence the title being misleading.
  - fullshark 9y ago
    She says she likes to take her time also and enjoy her coffee etc. I think it's fair to say it's a little misleading.
  - 9y ago
maxxxxx 9y ago
With self driving cars I see this happening even more.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Yes, but with a self-driving car you'll be able to sleep during your commute.
  - slackfan 9y ago
    I have slept and have seen plenty of other people sleep on trains all the time. Doesn't really change anything.
    - christoph 9y ago
      Tokyo is particularly well known for it. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/03/09/our-lives/sleeping-on-the-train-a-rite-of-passage-into-japanese-society/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/03/09/our-lives/...
    - auganov 9y ago
      If you own the car you'll be able to make it really nice a comfy. Being in it alone (or friends/family) also makes a big difference.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      What it will change is your sleep will be uninterrupted by transfers, and there's no chance you'll sleep through your stop. If it were me I'd get a van and put a bed in the back so I could lie down.
  - madcaptenor 9y ago
    Is that really good sleep, though? I've slept on trains, buses, planes, cars where I wasn't driving, and that sleep is never the same quality as sleep in a bed.
    - 9y ago
edward 9y ago
I think these articles about extreme commutes are interesting. I recommend you read what Mr. Money Mustache has to say on the subject. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
- ghaff 9y ago
  Eh. It's reasonable to point out that even a < 1 hr. car commute can be a bigger money leak than a lot of people appreciate. And I also believe that anyone commuting 2 hours each way daily needs to give serious thought to alternatives; it doesn't seem sustainable. That said, selling and buying houses (or changing jobs) on an ongoing basis so you're right next to your job doesn't seem like a great strategy either. And likely not a plausible one, at least outside of a city, if you have a partner who also goes into an office.
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    When choosing between jobs I try to calculate the true hourly wage I'd receive. I include transportation costs, travel time, expected unpaid overtime etc and pick not the highest salary but the highest hourly rate all things considered.
    - woobar 9y ago
      Unfortunately, in most cases the base salary is the only part of compensation that is 'guaranteed'. Overtime requirements could change after a few months, a job with a longer commute might allow work from home, etc. Your 'true rate' is an interesting piece of information to consider during job search, but I do not think it should have this much weight.
    - overcast 9y ago
      Do you calculate life lost as well? I'm being serious. There is a MASSIVE difference between a five minute commute, and an hour commute when you add it up over a lifetime. That's a stupid amount of your life wasted doing nothing.
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jdavis703 9y ago
One way to make this better is to support the plan to inline the Capitol Corridor and ACE trains with Caltrain via the unused and abandoned Dumbarton rail bridge [0]. Make sure to tell your elected officials you support this. [0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-study-needs-review-august-meetings/ http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
- melling 9y ago
  I wonder what they're doing in other parts of the world where the population is much larger? http://www.metro-report.com/news/single-view/view/beijing-maglev-carries-passengers.html http://www.metro-report.com/news/single-view/view/beijing-ma... http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-08/15/content_30620747.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-08/15/content_306...
  - komali2 9y ago
    Well, for one thing, Beijing is miles and miles of 20+story apartment highrises. I don't know why San Francisco is so resistant to that, seems inevitable to me.
- nshelly 9y ago
  Also, as our nation's metro areas become more dense, we need to make sure we have train connections that are co-located. For example, Pleasanton ACE and Pleasanton BART, or in San Francisco Caltrain and Muni/BART, which they are doing with the multi-year Downtown Extension project. These little things make a huge difference. Commuters eliminate an additional connection and get a small walk in. Diesel trains will eventually be replaced as well and then we can begin inlining but we should at least plan cities and stations to make public transit easier.
  - xvedejas 9y ago
    Same with Fremont. A terrible missed opportunity.
mudil 9y ago
Liberals like to talk big about the public transportation, but when it comes time to deliver they follow the unions' script that results in exuberant costs (to build the system and to run it) and extremely poor performance. And as a result the average folks and the poor suffer the most.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Or, traveling a 100 miles takes a couple hours even if it isn't public transit, because of things like safety, traffic, and the laws of physics. Also, a click-bait headline (she leaves at 4 am).
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Physics? Trains can do a lot better than 80 miles in three hours.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you've ever been to Europe before, where the liberals (and even the conservatives) do public transit right.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    Furthermore, unions in Europe are much more powerful than they are in the US. It must not be unions holding the US back if Europe can manage to build better transit with much stronger unions.
- komali2 9y ago
  Woah what, can you source any of that? Seems like you just took an opportunity to attack a political mindset.
__sha3d2 9y ago
I was going to come in here and talk about how this strikes me more as a personal choice than a symptom of a systemic problem (i lived well in SF on $60k, and I mean for fucks sake Stockton? that is aggressively far. There are many great closer options.), but who cares. This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.
- Phanyxx 9y ago
  ^Agreed, and agreed.
bartart 9y ago
It appears that when local cities have control over housing, they make decisions that are good for them, but bad for the state that needs higher paying jobs that generate tax revenue. Plus low density housing is bad for the environment when compared to high density: http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html Other places would move heaven and earth to have a place like Silicon Valley and it seems like California is shooting itself in the foot with this self inflicted housing shortage.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Thank you for the article link!
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santaclaus 9y ago
If a municipality decides to open 100 seats of office space, they should be required to zone and approve 100 beds for said workers to sleep in. Otherwise you have the situation where towns like Brisbane can build office complexes for the tax revenue and entirely pass the buck to their neighbors for the cost of housing the new workers.
- jakelarkin 9y ago
  This is a major major part of problem and one of the simpler legislative solutions. The extreme example is Cupertino and Palo Alto which have approved 10000s of office desks but resist building any meaningful housing whatsoever. Peninsula towns also need incentives/mandates to upzone around Caltrain. SF also does a huge desks to beds imbalance in approvals.
ucaetano 9y ago
San Francisco has more than twice the area of Manhattan, with half the population. The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland. Both have similar GDPs. If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min. The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
- lex_luthor 9y ago
  True. But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices. If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out. I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop. http://hyperloop-one.com/routes/ http://hyperloop-one.com/routes/
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Isn't hyperloop pretty low-capacity? I'm doubtful of any major effects on housing.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    No Hyperloop required, just off-the-shelf, standard rail technology that has been available for the past 30-40 years.
  - hypersoar 9y ago
    Hyperloops are a promising whizz-bang idea, but it's not like we haven't developed technology for mass transit. Subways, light rail, and dedicated bus ways all work rather well. The California high-speed rail is obscenely expensive mostly for political reasons, not logistical ones. Furthermore, a Hyperloop might get you from city to city, but then local transit is needed for those last couple miles.
  - 9y ago
yardie 9y ago
AS I've gotten older and more experienced I realized my commuting circle has shrunken. When I was dumb and young I was willing to commute 3 counties for work. Gas was cheap and apparently my time (1 hr each way) was cheaper. If it's not close by (<30 min) and I can't telecommute than I don't really care for it. I live in the city so there are plenty of other opportunities.
greyfox 9y ago
this woman needs a car drive it as far into the city as possible then park it and use transit
- komali2 9y ago
  And sit in traffic for an hour instead of relax on a train for 2? Ew. What this lady needs is a sweet GSXR-1000 to split all the way to paradise. I don't know why more people don't take advantage of the fact that lane splitting is legal here, it's a fantastic way to cut commute time in half. Plus you get free or super cheap parking pretty much wherever you want.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    Its more dangerous, lots of people don't even want to bicycle because of the perceived and possibly actual real danger.
  - hatsunearu 9y ago
    You're kidding right?
  - DesiLurker 9y ago
    My dear, Bikes aren't cheap if you factor in the funeral costs! Seriously though, the amount of additional risk of life/limb/etc you'd be taking by biking to work isnt worth saving an extra hour given the raised attentiveness you have to be on throughout the commute. What we all really need is cheap selfdriving vanpool networks that dynamically optimizes routes based on traffic flows. or better yet hub-to-hub VTOL human transport drones. In all honesty I think we'll see those before we'll see legislative action helping the housing crisis.
  - no-s 9y ago
    I hear getting a superbike after you hit 30 pretty much guarantees you'll be dead within 18 months...if we required this for older commuters think of the pension costs that could be saved...seriously these discussions all seem to revolve around "how can we penalize someone to incentivize some solution?" I'm happy this lady found a solution she was happy with. It's not like she's commuting to the salt mines in death race 2000...living in the Bay Area is a tangled web for anyone who doesn't have high 6 figures in disposable income. I gave up in disgust and voted with my feet.
ghomrassen 9y ago
What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Doesn't that solve many issues with housing supply? Looking at wikipedia, the density is crazy low even compared to other major cities in the US.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Entrenched residents who oppose new construction, primarily. Look at the recent kerfuffles involving residents opposing the replacement of parking lots with housing.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    Lack of infrastructure as well. Despite the low density, it is pain to get around SF and bay area generally unless you are luck enough to have a trip that starts or ends near one of the few rail lines. Double the density, and getting around would go from bad to worse.
    - panic 9y ago
      That's not necessarily true. More density could allow people to live closer to work and reduce the amount of traffic.
      - WillPostForFood 9y ago
        Even in dense cities (Manhattan), most people don't live walking distance to work. But they have a great public transportation system, so it works. The Bay Area has a terrible public transit system, and if you add density without improving it will get a lot harder to get around. Also, the big tech jobs centers (apple/facebook/Google) are in the south bay, and many of their employees (especially those without kids) choose to live in San Francisco because it is a much more interesting vibrant interesting place than Mountain View, Menlo Park, or Cupertino. Someone living in Noe Valley and working at Apple could already live closer to work, for much less, if that's what they wanted. So adding high density housing will allow some people to live closer, and some to live farther, but it will add incrementally more traffic. That's fine, but let's at least address the infrastructure in tandem, if not first.
mikejholly 9y ago
As a 5-year-long remote worker this seems archaic and cruel.
jdalgetty 9y ago
I guess my commute wasn't so bad :)
WalterSear 9y ago
I feel bad for her, but if she's taking an hour and a half to leave the house in the morning, she's >choosing< to get up at 2am.
- b4ux1t3 9y ago
  Is wanting to be fully alert before leaving the house so strange?
  - sluggg 9y ago
    yes. Particularly when you are driving to sit on a bus, then on a train where you don't have to be alert at all.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    Yes, if it takes you an hour and a half.
deckar01 9y ago
I paid about 30% of my salary in 2014 for a SRO [0] in San Francisco with a 10 minute commute. I decided that the quality of living was not worth the potential future earnings for staying in the bay area. In Tulsa I pay about 14% of my salary to rent a large apartment with a 4 minute commute. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
- olegkikin 9y ago
  But you make a lot less in the absolute terms. So you save less, you can afford less of cool stuff. Most people in the world want to move in the opposite direction.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    Most people in the world are not developers and cannot change jobs or locales as easily as them.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    Both ways of looking at it are problematic. The way you should look at it: Take your savings. If you suddenly could get no income, no welfare, etc: How many months/years can you maintain your current standard of living before you run out of money? Being paid more in absolute, and even saving more in absolute, doesn't guarantee a longer time till you go broke. It's the ratio of your savings to the monthly cost of living. I could move to the Bay area and get paid enough to save, say, $5K more per year than I do now, I'm still in worse shape because of the COL. Effectively, even though I'm saving more in absolute terms, I'll not be able to retire as early as I can now.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  70% of my salary in the Bay Area is over 1.5x 86% my salary elsewhere.
- pavanky 9y ago
  But is 70% of SF salary < 86% of Tulsa salary ? Even after we account for other expenditures (travel and food), it looks like a net benefit in SF (compared to Atlanta). The only down side would be buying an actual house. A house in Atlanta would be 3-5x my yearly Atlanta salary. A similar house in SF would cost 7-8x my yearly SF salary.
overcast 9y ago
Makes me appreciate what I have in Rochester. 5 minute commute if I don't hit the lights correctly. Drive home for lunch in silence, take a nap. Cost of living where I have more money than I know what to do with. The grind a lot of you put up with chasing money, is paid for with your life, literally.
peterjlee 9y ago
>Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda. She was forced out of her original apartment but unless she had a new situation that required her to have more bedrooms with a lower budget, some part of this extremity was her choice. I think NYT should've chosen a better example if the point they were trying to get across is "tech boom forcing workers out".
- Sodman 9y ago
  This really stood out for me too. Her commute is awful, but it seems more like a conscious compromise that she herself opted for (Larger house, cheaper budget, longer commute), given her work situation (able to work from home) and personal lifestyle choices (likes to take her time, takes the stairs at the station, gets off the train a stop early to have a leisurely walk on her commute). Maybe it was the style of writing in the article, but it didn't give me the impression that Ms. James is unhappy with her choice to move.
sidcool 9y ago
I travel 1 hour one way and find it brutal. Can't begin to imagine what this person must be going through.
- b4ux1t3 9y ago
  My dad has been doing an hour and a half (each way) commute for the better part of the last decade. I ended up doing the same commute when I started a new job last week. I'm already dying to move into my new apartment. I don't know how these people do it. And to be clear, the hour+ commute wouldn't be so bad if it were just driving. But stop-and-go traffic does not a relaxing drive make.
downrightmike 9y ago
The odds are that in WWIII it will be lost and then will be able to be rebuilt like a actual modern city with proper infrastructure. All those amazing buildings that we see in the Star Trek movies and shows probably weren't built while Nimby's were still there. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/21st_century http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/21st_century
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jakelarkin 9y ago
Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.
- kevinburke 9y ago
  That's $12000 extra on rent per year, which is a lot to someone making $80k a year.
  - QML 9y ago
    Take the time to commute (8hrs) into consideration. Is that extra $12000 worth it?
    - vthallam 9y ago
      For some people, yes.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      Probably. They mentioned apartment sizes in the article. The other quality of life improvements would be pretty massive since her commute puts her somewhere her dollars go much farther because she's not competing with the SV crowd for goods and services.
    - sageabilly 9y ago
      In the article she can work from home some days a week (I know for feds in DC, it's mandatory 5 days out of 10, so maybe at least that many for her) and she has a government job which (for many in the non-tech, non-startup world) is the Holy Grail of jobs- incredibly stable, great benefits, pension, etc. She's 61, so in her mind the trade-off might be worth it if she plans on retiring at 65 (and perhaps even earlier if she's got a ton of time in her PTO bank). Coming at the angle of a young tech person raising a family, the trade-off might not be worth it, but for an older person with retirement coming soon, the priorities are different.
sodapopcan 9y ago
It's odd this article doesn't mention what time she goes to bed or how much sleep she gets. I found that was all I wanted to know first reading the headline to the end of the article. It mentions people sleep on the train but never really confirms if she does (the one photo of her in the train she is looking at her phone so I assume not).
rbcgerard 9y ago
1. I wonder what her commuting cost are + having to have a car is a month? 2. Stockton has a median income of $45k vs $81k in SF [factfinder.census.gov] - so in SF she is right in the middle, in Stockton she is at twice the median income (for households) is it really surprising to anyone that she can get more for her housing $ in Stockton?
DeepRote 9y ago
The reason it's so expensive to live near SF is because of people like this. Your landlord knows how much you'll pay if they know you work in the gay area and will tolerate a 5-hour commute. It's the same reason NJ is becoming more expensive. They know you'll pay because you're willing to ride PATH every day to get to work. Don't commute more than an hour to work. If you can't afford to live close to your work, find different work. People like this are making it even worse, and not just in SF, in NYC, in Boston, in and around Raleigh, in ATX, everywhere. Commuting is making it harder for other people and yourself.
- wbl 9y ago
  Actually refusing to build more housing is what is raising prices.
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Grustaf 9y ago
As the article says, she could sleep 90 minutes longer. And if she drove to work, she does have a car, she could easily leave at five. She could also get a 3200 dollar apartment where she used to live, have at least two rooms, sleep late and still have 3550 left every month. Maybe medical insurance and such things that we europeans don't need to buy are very expensive, but apart from that it doesn't seem very difficult to live on 3500 after rent for a single person. My whole family spends less than that after rent, four people in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Copenhagen. I must be missing part of the equation here.
- got2surf 9y ago
  Take-home salary after taxes could be a lot less than $6,750 per month. Health insurance is probably reasonably priced given that she seems to have a government job. But I do see your point - she could (and many do) live closer, pay more, and sleep more.
  - Grustaf 9y ago
    Good point about the tax, American salaries are quoted pre tax of course! I've spendt the whole afternoon with my nose in P&Ls, where the quoted salary is pretty much what is interesting. In any case, I feel the headline is pretty sensationalistic, even if she wants to live where she lives, she could probably get up at 5 and drive to work.
sluggg 9y ago
We should seriously consider following Norways example of moving government buildings to the suburbs.
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djhworld 9y ago
My commute is 55 - 65 minutes each way, and 70% of that is spent underground. That's more than enough for me, don't think I could stomach any longer than that!
ktRolster 9y ago
This is what happens when you let office space be built without building extra housing.
owenversteeg 9y ago
Why isn't there a good, inexpensive bus? You can fit almost one hundred passengers on a single bus. Buses are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger, easy to reroute if you have more/less demand, and you can go directly to where you need to go. They scale very well - if there are only 20 people or so you can send a small bus, if there are thousands you can send multiple large buses. Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem. In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton. Why has nobody done this?
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Why has nobody done this? You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper
ChuckMcM 9y ago
This is a pretty amazing example. It raises more questions than it answers however. The big one is "Why continue working in SF with this horrible commute?" Market dynamics suggest that in a 'free' market, on an individual basis, a person seeks to maximize their value received. So in this case, if this was an open market, the (commute + $81K/year) > any other option that she might choose. So what are we missing that there isn't at least an equal paying job available in the Central Valley that would cut her commute by 80 - 90% ? I can imagine lots of things that might contribute like pension eligibility, or specialization. But "Public Health Advisor for DHHS" seems to be a position that is available in many cities in the state. I would have liked to read what about this job in this city was so important. And all of that is to the meta question of salary growth has been flat for a long time, but for a long time people felt they had to keep their job at all costs. A what point does the advantage change? 3% unemployment? 2%? What needs to happen so that people are confident enough to say "pay me more or I'll work somewhere else." ? As a result of the stuff I wonder about, I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. And I wonder what happens when it snaps. Do we get the 10 - 15% stag-flation of the 70s?
- tmpdude01 9y ago
  I immediately searched for the word "pension" in the comments, and your comment was the only one to have it. She's 62 years old, and commuting to this job so that she can maximize her pension. https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/retirement-benefits https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/r...
  - cbcoutinho 9y ago
    Getting through tough times is much easier with an end in sight and incentives to keep going. This is truly the right answer
- pnathan 9y ago
  > I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. Seattle, by any number of metrics, is one of the Boomtowns in America today. But when you walk down almost all the major streets, there are usually at least one boarded up storefront. House prices are > 10x annual US median salary, and 5-7x the median Seattle salary. Homeless people are everywhere downtown. The "family size" apartments are nearly non-existent until you get a solid 30+ minutes away (everything is being aimed at rich people or young singles); single family houses are (comfortably) priced to people with a solid 200k+ combined salary (you CAN stretch it of course, but memories of prior bubbles suggest stretching it on living situations is a poor choice). This isn't making sense: it does not seem sustainable as a system. Haven't dug into the numbers for Seattle, but the blue collar factories in the US etc are being pinched by a lack of entrants: no one wants to work for $12/hr and be at the bottom of the totem pole, but the employers claim they can't pay more. I read newspaper stories about this periodically. Structurally, of course, there is significant financial inequality between municipalities/states/cities and more rural areas, and the concentration of wealth (jobs, culture, hope) in these metro areas is generating salt lake effects in many rural areas. I think there's a definite snapping point in the economy that the current direction doesn't seem to be changing. I think, frankly, the US economy has metaphorical 'toxic' areas that haven't been honestly addressed and it's generating a lot of resentment.
suenyoj 9y ago
SELF DRIVING CARS is the solution. Just go sleep in your car and 3 hours later you can start working.
ProfessorLayton 9y ago
I don't dispute that Bay Area housing is very expensive, and there are plenty of issue it needs to address, but this person seems so have made a personal choice to have that commute, which I commend if thats the lifestyle she wants. Perhaps her personal circumstances didn't allow for it (Or she chose not to, which is fine too), but a home can be purchased for as little as 3.5% down (FHA) + closing costs. For someone with an 81K salary, their borrowing limit is around ~460k (@43% FHA DTI Limit [1]), and in 2014 (When the person in the article was evicted) there were plenty of homes in that price range in the East Bay. That DTI won't be easy, but neither is a 6-8hr daily commute. In fact, there are homes/condos right now [2] still in that price range. The crisis is for those making the median household income of say, 52.9K in Oakland, thats the income where one is basically shut out of the housing market. [1] https://www.fha.com/fha_requirements_debt https://www.fha.com/fha_requirements_debt [2] https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/filter/property-type=house+condo+townhouse,min-price=100k,max-price=400k,viewport=37.93869:37.57279:-121.89166:-122.579,no-outline https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/filter/property...
kamaal 9y ago
Just playing the devils advocate by posting some themes discussed on the article's comment section. - She apparently can't relocate as she makes $81K as a federal employee. Most commenters seem to point out they make far less for equally brutal commute, and don't even complain. - She also works from home every now and then. Something which most other people like Chefs, Janitors, Barbers who are paid way less, don't even have an option to do by very occupational design. - She qualifies for pension after some time. There fore it's not too much to expect somebody to make a little sacrifice for a few decades worth of getting paid without doing anything at all. - Most other commenters seem to point out that they would love to have a job which pays $81K, with benefits and a pension even at that commute time. Therefore this is not a problem, this is actually an opportunity. Most comments seem to have a 'Cry me a river' kind of a sentiment.

287 points by el_benhameen 9y ago

While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages. This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.

colek42 9y ago
why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Don't they do this already with property and state income taxes?
- twobyfour 9y ago
  The taxes that states and municipalities are giving them breaks on in order to lure them into the region?
- cbhl 9y ago
  The SFMTA Commuter Shuttle Program is only allowed to recover costs of the program itself, for regulatory reasons. Locals don't actually want to fix this problem -- ethnic groups are afraid of losing their homes, because historically that's what new housing construction has done. All of SoMa was built by razing a predominantly black community and replacing it with what is there now. You can go to the SFMOMA and see photos of what it used to look like.
wvenable 9y ago
Yeah, someone who is 62 isn't just going to get another equivalent job close to home.
andrewjl 9y ago
This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  True, but new housing wouldn't be needed if there wasn't such a high influx of people moving into the Bay area. Sure tech isn't the only player in the game, but they're surely one of the biggest. If less people were moving there for high paying jobs - rent wouldn't rise as quickly or as drastically.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    > new housing wouldn't be needed Bay Area housing supply has been growing less than demand for the last 30 years. New housing is needed, regardless of who is employing whom.
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      California building codes are pretty extreme from what I've seen, they go as far as measuring the pull force required to open a door for example. This seems like a place where a little deregulation would go a long way.
      - mvid 9y ago
        That's a nice idea, but this is a region where the ground you build on is your enemy.
        falsedan 9y ago
        Counterpoint: Tokyo.
        9y ago
ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago
...because these companies can just go somewhere else that won't pressure them, so when cities are faced with a billion dollar tech campus or none at all they often feel like they have to bend. Cities often even cut taxes to see big companies come into town. Capitalism will always win against public infrastructure.
- weberc2 9y ago
  It's not really "winning" so much as finding an economic equilibrium (unless that's what you mean by "capitalism"). I think the problem here is the regulation that prevents the construction of new homes. If you remove that artificial barrier, housing costs could decline. Alternatively, the municipalities could tax the real estate developers who are profiting from the regulation, but if you can get that resolution to pass muster then there probably wouldn't be any regulation to begin with.
  - ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago
    good point
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ehnto 9y ago
Would that be the purpose of property tax and state corporate taxes? Genuine question. I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  I think in theory this is how it should work - but I think part of the issue is the multi-city sprawl that's happening. When an area of influence grows that big, who is held responsible? I'm sure no one is volunteering to pick up the slack and shoulder the burden of all the improvements.
rhizome 9y ago
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.
Analemma_ 9y ago
There are so many misconceptions in this post... > why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people? > Lower income housing? Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started. The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs. > If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars). > move their headquarters out of the city centers? They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center. > It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages. Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  I'll admit I'm not a city planner. I don't have the answers to the problems. It's just frustrating to see what's happening with these mega-cities and how it's affecting the lives of so many people negatively. Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they? Bay area has a whole bucket of specific problems - but there are general shared trends that extend to other cities with big tech industries.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    > Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they? I think the answer is that with well-managed development, having boosted economies can have few or no negative aspects, but the Bay Area is sorely lacking that right now. As others have said, the lion's share of the blame is not with the tech companies (they're just hiring workers they need), but with the area's terrible NIMBY politics that are blocking the construction of more housing.
jsonne 9y ago
You assume that everyone working for a tech company is a 6 figure programmer. There are plenty of secretaries, social media coordinators, sales people etc. That likely make less than what a sanitation worker, cop firefighter, etc. make. It isn't so clear cut.
wang_li 9y ago
Just yesterday I was commenting here on this very situation, but she has already moved her home out of the city in search of less expensive rent. She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever, they can pay prices that reflect the true cost of living in the city and not some indirect subsidized price.
- greyfox 9y ago
  or just bring your own coffee and lunch?
- icebraining 9y ago
  She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever ...she's a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I'm pretty sure she's not selling sandwiches.
  - wang_li 9y ago
    The same principle applies.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      How so? What do highly paid workers in the city have to do with her job?
      - wang_li 9y ago
        She presumably provides a service to those in the area where she works. Whether she makes sandwiches or gives life advice, the price paid by the consumers of her service should be somewhat correlated with the cost of living in the area.
- fencepost 9y ago
  TL;DR on my own comment: she's in her early 60s with all that entails for jobs and job hunting. She's making the best of being basically trapped.
ianai 9y ago
I think there's a problem of congregation. i.e. Real network effects reinforcing labor concentration - to the exclusion of support business. Companies want their employees close at hand. Those same employees attract further, similar businesses nearby. I don't know how to change that. Tele-presence doesn't seem as in demand.
davidf18 9y ago
The issue is the zoning density restrictions that cause and politically induced scarcity of housing -- "rent seeking" a form of market failure or market inefficiency. The fix is quite simple: rescind the zoning laws that create artificial scarcity of land which benefits wealthy landlords such as our President Trump while making renters pay far higher rents than they would in a functioning, efficient market. Since about 2001, Japan has had federal laws that overrule local laws related to zoning. The result: in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs < 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC. Get rid of the laws that create market failures, that prohibit the market from working efficiently, and you will see a big housing boom and plenty of housing. It is really that simple.
FireBeyond 9y ago
On the other hand, I feel that she's over-compensating a little. No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way... But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").
- rbcgerard 9y ago
  I think the answer is she's making a choice based on her preferences: 1. Live and Work in SF make $80k, and live in small expensive housing 2. Work in SF and make $80k, live in Stockton and get more and pay less for a house, and spend a ton of time commuting 3. Live and Work in Stockton, make way less, live in a place larger than SF but Smaller than #2 and not have to commute She chose #2 - others make different choices
  - spiralpolitik 9y ago
    For (3) you are of course assuming that there is a job in Stockton for her skill set. There may not be which makes option 3 an non starter.
- ojbyrne 9y ago
  Minor note, because my thoughts were along similar lines - she was evicted from her $1600/month apt, and presumably would pay significantly more for it now.
- OrwellianChild 9y ago
  I think it's important to acknowledge a very different set of priorities for someone in their early 60s, who is: 1) Close to retirement age 2) Likely still saving as much as possible so she can retire 3) May have other expenses not detailed in the article, stemming from family needs, health concerns, etc. Also note that a property management company is evaluating someone from the "risk of non-payment" perspective - not a financial advisor's.
twblalock 9y ago
Why punish companies for being successful enough to create attractive, high-paying jobs? The consequences of doing that won't be very good for anyone. A slower economy will hurt the low-income workers a bit more than the high-income workers. What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  Why not punish companies for creating jobs in an already crowded area? How many attractive, high-paying jobs in SF are tied to the city by any physical necessity? If companies want to avoid being punished, all they have to do is move their offices to a less crowded city.
  - wbl 9y ago
    It isn't crowded. SF is less dense then Brooklyn. The "city" of Palo Alto could easily use a few more stories.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Crowding is the whole point of cities: get lots of people and jobs together in a small space and let them benefit from each other. If lack of crowding is more important to someone than economic opportunity, they can go live in the countryside. The benefits of centralization & economic opportunity for you but no one else isn't a stable equilibrium or a coherent policy goal. The only way you could plausibly achieve that over the long term is with border controls and immigration policy, something that's explicitly off the table for the interior of the United States per the Constitution.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    If they move to a less-crowded city, and offer good jobs there, that city will become crowded, especially when former employees leave to start other companies in the same area. That's how Silicon Valley became what it is. If a lot of tech companies moved to other cities, it would probably happen there, too.
nerfhammer 9y ago
The same thing is happening in most other cities albeit perhaps more slowly, most of which have no particular industry to blame it on. It's a shortage caused by zoning. https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thwarting-economic-mobility-2466575966.html https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...
ethanhunt_ 9y ago
Why should taxpayers subsidize unsustainable prices for the restaurants/shops/services? If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
- svachalek 9y ago
  Nah, there are much more viable market solutions. There will be 4 sandwich makers sharing that apartment, or they will commute for hours, or the sandwiches will be made somewhere else and shipped in, or the sandwich shop will make you build your own sandwich, or it will understaff and you'll have to wait 30 minutes for your sandwich...
stillhere 9y ago
This all falls squarely on the shoulders on landlords and their greed. Once they take a look at the applicant's tech salaries, the prices go up.
closeparen 9y ago
>why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization. It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years. And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?

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PopsiclePete 9y ago

So why do we keep commuting for jobs that don't really require our physical presence? It was a long hard battle for me to be able to work from home, and yes, I sometimes do miss out on face-to-face interaction, but going to the office 2 instead of 5 days a week is still a huge win - I'm not in a car out there, making traffic worse for you. You're welcome. Can we please solve the supposed "interaction" problem with some nice digital pens and white-boards and web cams and just .... work from anywhere?

nxsynonym 9y ago
This seems like the most logical solution. I think the issue is that the people who are impacted the most by these long commutes are workers who can't physically work remotely. The people who work for companies that could implement it, generally live close enough that the commute doesn't bother them in the first place.
asadlionpk 9y ago
The thing is we are not there yet. But this will eventually happen either by VR-like presence or just async style work (culture requiring less realtime interactions by design)
boondaburrah 9y ago
because in some cases, it's me that requires the physical presence - not the job. Working physically with the team is amazingly better for my productivity. Unfortunately, I have to take the jobs where they are. Since public transit is so bad, that's brutal commutes.
xeromal 9y ago
I hate working from home. I'm a social being.
- PopsiclePete 9y ago
  Me too - which is why I still go to the office - just not 5 days a week. If we could stagger people's schedules somehow - you go on Monday, I go on Tuesday - and do that on a massive scale - it should help traffic congestion quite a bit. Or we could actually build some nice mass transit in this country. But now I'm just talking crazy.

turtlebits 9y ago

A little misleading as she needs to catch the train at 4am. Still, an almost 3 hour commute is brutal.

rhizome 9y ago
Misleading? Do you not include layovers in the time it takes to travel somewhere? Most people do.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  The article says she gets up at 2:15 but doesn't have to leave home until 4:00. As it's generally possible to get ready for work in less than 105 minutes, the "2:15 Alarm" bit highlighted in the headline is a little misleading.
- sp332 9y ago
  But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. “I just can’t rush like that,” she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from leisure to precision. She could get up somewhat later to catch her train.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Right. That's addressed later in the article.
    - mmanfrin 9y ago
      Hence the title being misleading.
- fullshark 9y ago
  She says she likes to take her time also and enjoy her coffee etc. I think it's fair to say it's a little misleading.
- 9y ago

maxxxxx 9y ago

With self driving cars I see this happening even more.

gozur88 9y ago
Yes, but with a self-driving car you'll be able to sleep during your commute.
- slackfan 9y ago
  I have slept and have seen plenty of other people sleep on trains all the time. Doesn't really change anything.
  - christoph 9y ago
    Tokyo is particularly well known for it. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/03/09/our-lives/sleeping-on-the-train-a-rite-of-passage-into-japanese-society/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/03/09/our-lives/...
  - auganov 9y ago
    If you own the car you'll be able to make it really nice a comfy. Being in it alone (or friends/family) also makes a big difference.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    What it will change is your sleep will be uninterrupted by transfers, and there's no chance you'll sleep through your stop. If it were me I'd get a van and put a bed in the back so I could lie down.
- madcaptenor 9y ago
  Is that really good sleep, though? I've slept on trains, buses, planes, cars where I wasn't driving, and that sleep is never the same quality as sleep in a bed.
  - 9y ago

edward 9y ago

I think these articles about extreme commutes are interesting. I recommend you read what Mr. Money Mustache has to say on the subject. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

ghaff 9y ago
Eh. It's reasonable to point out that even a < 1 hr. car commute can be a bigger money leak than a lot of people appreciate. And I also believe that anyone commuting 2 hours each way daily needs to give serious thought to alternatives; it doesn't seem sustainable. That said, selling and buying houses (or changing jobs) on an ongoing basis so you're right next to your job doesn't seem like a great strategy either. And likely not a plausible one, at least outside of a city, if you have a partner who also goes into an office.
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  When choosing between jobs I try to calculate the true hourly wage I'd receive. I include transportation costs, travel time, expected unpaid overtime etc and pick not the highest salary but the highest hourly rate all things considered.
  - woobar 9y ago
    Unfortunately, in most cases the base salary is the only part of compensation that is 'guaranteed'. Overtime requirements could change after a few months, a job with a longer commute might allow work from home, etc. Your 'true rate' is an interesting piece of information to consider during job search, but I do not think it should have this much weight.
  - overcast 9y ago
    Do you calculate life lost as well? I'm being serious. There is a MASSIVE difference between a five minute commute, and an hour commute when you add it up over a lifetime. That's a stupid amount of your life wasted doing nothing.

deleted 9y ago

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jdavis703 9y ago

One way to make this better is to support the plan to inline the Capitol Corridor and ACE trains with Caltrain via the unused and abandoned Dumbarton rail bridge [0]. Make sure to tell your elected officials you support this. [0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-study-needs-review-august-meetings/ http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...

melling 9y ago
I wonder what they're doing in other parts of the world where the population is much larger? http://www.metro-report.com/news/single-view/view/beijing-maglev-carries-passengers.html http://www.metro-report.com/news/single-view/view/beijing-ma... http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-08/15/content_30620747.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-08/15/content_306...
- komali2 9y ago
  Well, for one thing, Beijing is miles and miles of 20+story apartment highrises. I don't know why San Francisco is so resistant to that, seems inevitable to me.
nshelly 9y ago
Also, as our nation's metro areas become more dense, we need to make sure we have train connections that are co-located. For example, Pleasanton ACE and Pleasanton BART, or in San Francisco Caltrain and Muni/BART, which they are doing with the multi-year Downtown Extension project. These little things make a huge difference. Commuters eliminate an additional connection and get a small walk in. Diesel trains will eventually be replaced as well and then we can begin inlining but we should at least plan cities and stations to make public transit easier.
- xvedejas 9y ago
  Same with Fremont. A terrible missed opportunity.

mudil 9y ago

Liberals like to talk big about the public transportation, but when it comes time to deliver they follow the unions' script that results in exuberant costs (to build the system and to run it) and extremely poor performance. And as a result the average folks and the poor suffer the most.

SolarNet 9y ago
Or, traveling a 100 miles takes a couple hours even if it isn't public transit, because of things like safety, traffic, and the laws of physics. Also, a click-bait headline (she leaves at 4 am).
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Physics? Trains can do a lot better than 80 miles in three hours.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
I'm not sure if you've ever been to Europe before, where the liberals (and even the conservatives) do public transit right.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Furthermore, unions in Europe are much more powerful than they are in the US. It must not be unions holding the US back if Europe can manage to build better transit with much stronger unions.
komali2 9y ago
Woah what, can you source any of that? Seems like you just took an opportunity to attack a political mindset.

__sha3d2 9y ago

I was going to come in here and talk about how this strikes me more as a personal choice than a symptom of a systemic problem (i lived well in SF on $60k, and I mean for fucks sake Stockton? that is aggressively far. There are many great closer options.), but who cares. This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.

Phanyxx 9y ago
^Agreed, and agreed.

bartart 9y ago

It appears that when local cities have control over housing, they make decisions that are good for them, but bad for the state that needs higher paying jobs that generate tax revenue. Plus low density housing is bad for the environment when compared to high density: http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html Other places would move heaven and earth to have a place like Silicon Valley and it seems like California is shooting itself in the foot with this self inflicted housing shortage.

twobyfour 9y ago
Thank you for the article link!

deleted 9y ago

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santaclaus 9y ago

If a municipality decides to open 100 seats of office space, they should be required to zone and approve 100 beds for said workers to sleep in. Otherwise you have the situation where towns like Brisbane can build office complexes for the tax revenue and entirely pass the buck to their neighbors for the cost of housing the new workers.

jakelarkin 9y ago
This is a major major part of problem and one of the simpler legislative solutions. The extreme example is Cupertino and Palo Alto which have approved 10000s of office desks but resist building any meaningful housing whatsoever. Peninsula towns also need incentives/mandates to upzone around Caltrain. SF also does a huge desks to beds imbalance in approvals.

ucaetano 9y ago

San Francisco has more than twice the area of Manhattan, with half the population. The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland. Both have similar GDPs. If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min. The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.

lex_luthor 9y ago
True. But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices. If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out. I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop. http://hyperloop-one.com/routes/ http://hyperloop-one.com/routes/
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Isn't hyperloop pretty low-capacity? I'm doubtful of any major effects on housing.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  No Hyperloop required, just off-the-shelf, standard rail technology that has been available for the past 30-40 years.
- hypersoar 9y ago
  Hyperloops are a promising whizz-bang idea, but it's not like we haven't developed technology for mass transit. Subways, light rail, and dedicated bus ways all work rather well. The California high-speed rail is obscenely expensive mostly for political reasons, not logistical ones. Furthermore, a Hyperloop might get you from city to city, but then local transit is needed for those last couple miles.
- 9y ago

yardie 9y ago

AS I've gotten older and more experienced I realized my commuting circle has shrunken. When I was dumb and young I was willing to commute 3 counties for work. Gas was cheap and apparently my time (1 hr each way) was cheaper. If it's not close by (<30 min) and I can't telecommute than I don't really care for it. I live in the city so there are plenty of other opportunities.

greyfox 9y ago

this woman needs a car drive it as far into the city as possible then park it and use transit

komali2 9y ago
And sit in traffic for an hour instead of relax on a train for 2? Ew. What this lady needs is a sweet GSXR-1000 to split all the way to paradise. I don't know why more people don't take advantage of the fact that lane splitting is legal here, it's a fantastic way to cut commute time in half. Plus you get free or super cheap parking pretty much wherever you want.
- s0rce 9y ago
  Its more dangerous, lots of people don't even want to bicycle because of the perceived and possibly actual real danger.
- hatsunearu 9y ago
  You're kidding right?
- DesiLurker 9y ago
  My dear, Bikes aren't cheap if you factor in the funeral costs! Seriously though, the amount of additional risk of life/limb/etc you'd be taking by biking to work isnt worth saving an extra hour given the raised attentiveness you have to be on throughout the commute. What we all really need is cheap selfdriving vanpool networks that dynamically optimizes routes based on traffic flows. or better yet hub-to-hub VTOL human transport drones. In all honesty I think we'll see those before we'll see legislative action helping the housing crisis.
- no-s 9y ago
  I hear getting a superbike after you hit 30 pretty much guarantees you'll be dead within 18 months...if we required this for older commuters think of the pension costs that could be saved...seriously these discussions all seem to revolve around "how can we penalize someone to incentivize some solution?" I'm happy this lady found a solution she was happy with. It's not like she's commuting to the salt mines in death race 2000...living in the Bay Area is a tangled web for anyone who doesn't have high 6 figures in disposable income. I gave up in disgust and voted with my feet.

ghomrassen 9y ago

What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Doesn't that solve many issues with housing supply? Looking at wikipedia, the density is crazy low even compared to other major cities in the US.

santaclaus 9y ago
> What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Entrenched residents who oppose new construction, primarily. Look at the recent kerfuffles involving residents opposing the replacement of parking lots with housing.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  Lack of infrastructure as well. Despite the low density, it is pain to get around SF and bay area generally unless you are luck enough to have a trip that starts or ends near one of the few rail lines. Double the density, and getting around would go from bad to worse.
  - panic 9y ago
    That's not necessarily true. More density could allow people to live closer to work and reduce the amount of traffic.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      Even in dense cities (Manhattan), most people don't live walking distance to work. But they have a great public transportation system, so it works. The Bay Area has a terrible public transit system, and if you add density without improving it will get a lot harder to get around. Also, the big tech jobs centers (apple/facebook/Google) are in the south bay, and many of their employees (especially those without kids) choose to live in San Francisco because it is a much more interesting vibrant interesting place than Mountain View, Menlo Park, or Cupertino. Someone living in Noe Valley and working at Apple could already live closer to work, for much less, if that's what they wanted. So adding high density housing will allow some people to live closer, and some to live farther, but it will add incrementally more traffic. That's fine, but let's at least address the infrastructure in tandem, if not first.

mikejholly 9y ago

As a 5-year-long remote worker this seems archaic and cruel.

jdalgetty 9y ago

I guess my commute wasn't so bad :)

WalterSear 9y ago

I feel bad for her, but if she's taking an hour and a half to leave the house in the morning, she's >choosing< to get up at 2am.

b4ux1t3 9y ago
Is wanting to be fully alert before leaving the house so strange?
- sluggg 9y ago
  yes. Particularly when you are driving to sit on a bus, then on a train where you don't have to be alert at all.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  Yes, if it takes you an hour and a half.

deckar01 9y ago

I paid about 30% of my salary in 2014 for a SRO [0] in San Francisco with a 10 minute commute. I decided that the quality of living was not worth the potential future earnings for staying in the bay area. In Tulsa I pay about 14% of my salary to rent a large apartment with a 4 minute commute. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

olegkikin 9y ago
But you make a lot less in the absolute terms. So you save less, you can afford less of cool stuff. Most people in the world want to move in the opposite direction.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  Most people in the world are not developers and cannot change jobs or locales as easily as them.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  Both ways of looking at it are problematic. The way you should look at it: Take your savings. If you suddenly could get no income, no welfare, etc: How many months/years can you maintain your current standard of living before you run out of money? Being paid more in absolute, and even saving more in absolute, doesn't guarantee a longer time till you go broke. It's the ratio of your savings to the monthly cost of living. I could move to the Bay area and get paid enough to save, say, $5K more per year than I do now, I'm still in worse shape because of the COL. Effectively, even though I'm saving more in absolute terms, I'll not be able to retire as early as I can now.
mattnewton 9y ago
70% of my salary in the Bay Area is over 1.5x 86% my salary elsewhere.
pavanky 9y ago
But is 70% of SF salary < 86% of Tulsa salary ? Even after we account for other expenditures (travel and food), it looks like a net benefit in SF (compared to Atlanta). The only down side would be buying an actual house. A house in Atlanta would be 3-5x my yearly Atlanta salary. A similar house in SF would cost 7-8x my yearly SF salary.

overcast 9y ago

Makes me appreciate what I have in Rochester. 5 minute commute if I don't hit the lights correctly. Drive home for lunch in silence, take a nap. Cost of living where I have more money than I know what to do with. The grind a lot of you put up with chasing money, is paid for with your life, literally.

peterjlee 9y ago

>Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda. She was forced out of her original apartment but unless she had a new situation that required her to have more bedrooms with a lower budget, some part of this extremity was her choice. I think NYT should've chosen a better example if the point they were trying to get across is "tech boom forcing workers out".

Sodman 9y ago
This really stood out for me too. Her commute is awful, but it seems more like a conscious compromise that she herself opted for (Larger house, cheaper budget, longer commute), given her work situation (able to work from home) and personal lifestyle choices (likes to take her time, takes the stairs at the station, gets off the train a stop early to have a leisurely walk on her commute). Maybe it was the style of writing in the article, but it didn't give me the impression that Ms. James is unhappy with her choice to move.

sidcool 9y ago

I travel 1 hour one way and find it brutal. Can't begin to imagine what this person must be going through.

b4ux1t3 9y ago
My dad has been doing an hour and a half (each way) commute for the better part of the last decade. I ended up doing the same commute when I started a new job last week. I'm already dying to move into my new apartment. I don't know how these people do it. And to be clear, the hour+ commute wouldn't be so bad if it were just driving. But stop-and-go traffic does not a relaxing drive make.

downrightmike 9y ago

The odds are that in WWIII it will be lost and then will be able to be rebuilt like a actual modern city with proper infrastructure. All those amazing buildings that we see in the Star Trek movies and shows probably weren't built while Nimby's were still there. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/21st_century http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/21st_century

deleted 9y ago

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jakelarkin 9y ago

Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.

kevinburke 9y ago
That's $12000 extra on rent per year, which is a lot to someone making $80k a year.
- QML 9y ago
  Take the time to commute (8hrs) into consideration. Is that extra $12000 worth it?
  - vthallam 9y ago
    For some people, yes.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Probably. They mentioned apartment sizes in the article. The other quality of life improvements would be pretty massive since her commute puts her somewhere her dollars go much farther because she's not competing with the SV crowd for goods and services.
  - sageabilly 9y ago
    In the article she can work from home some days a week (I know for feds in DC, it's mandatory 5 days out of 10, so maybe at least that many for her) and she has a government job which (for many in the non-tech, non-startup world) is the Holy Grail of jobs- incredibly stable, great benefits, pension, etc. She's 61, so in her mind the trade-off might be worth it if she plans on retiring at 65 (and perhaps even earlier if she's got a ton of time in her PTO bank). Coming at the angle of a young tech person raising a family, the trade-off might not be worth it, but for an older person with retirement coming soon, the priorities are different.

sodapopcan 9y ago

It's odd this article doesn't mention what time she goes to bed or how much sleep she gets. I found that was all I wanted to know first reading the headline to the end of the article. It mentions people sleep on the train but never really confirms if she does (the one photo of her in the train she is looking at her phone so I assume not).

rbcgerard 9y ago

1. I wonder what her commuting cost are + having to have a car is a month? 2. Stockton has a median income of $45k vs $81k in SF [factfinder.census.gov] - so in SF she is right in the middle, in Stockton she is at twice the median income (for households) is it really surprising to anyone that she can get more for her housing $ in Stockton?

DeepRote 9y ago

The reason it's so expensive to live near SF is because of people like this. Your landlord knows how much you'll pay if they know you work in the gay area and will tolerate a 5-hour commute. It's the same reason NJ is becoming more expensive. They know you'll pay because you're willing to ride PATH every day to get to work. Don't commute more than an hour to work. If you can't afford to live close to your work, find different work. People like this are making it even worse, and not just in SF, in NYC, in Boston, in and around Raleigh, in ATX, everywhere. Commuting is making it harder for other people and yourself.

wbl 9y ago
Actually refusing to build more housing is what is raising prices.

deleted 9y ago

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Grustaf 9y ago

As the article says, she could sleep 90 minutes longer. And if she drove to work, she does have a car, she could easily leave at five. She could also get a 3200 dollar apartment where she used to live, have at least two rooms, sleep late and still have 3550 left every month. Maybe medical insurance and such things that we europeans don't need to buy are very expensive, but apart from that it doesn't seem very difficult to live on 3500 after rent for a single person. My whole family spends less than that after rent, four people in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Copenhagen. I must be missing part of the equation here.

got2surf 9y ago
Take-home salary after taxes could be a lot less than $6,750 per month. Health insurance is probably reasonably priced given that she seems to have a government job. But I do see your point - she could (and many do) live closer, pay more, and sleep more.
- Grustaf 9y ago
  Good point about the tax, American salaries are quoted pre tax of course! I've spendt the whole afternoon with my nose in P&Ls, where the quoted salary is pretty much what is interesting. In any case, I feel the headline is pretty sensationalistic, even if she wants to live where she lives, she could probably get up at 5 and drive to work.

sluggg 9y ago

We should seriously consider following Norways example of moving government buildings to the suburbs.

deleted 9y ago

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djhworld 9y ago

My commute is 55 - 65 minutes each way, and 70% of that is spent underground. That's more than enough for me, don't think I could stomach any longer than that!

ktRolster 9y ago

This is what happens when you let office space be built without building extra housing.

owenversteeg 9y ago

Why isn't there a good, inexpensive bus? You can fit almost one hundred passengers on a single bus. Buses are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger, easy to reroute if you have more/less demand, and you can go directly to where you need to go. They scale very well - if there are only 20 people or so you can send a small bus, if there are thousands you can send multiple large buses. Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem. In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton. Why has nobody done this?

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Why has nobody done this? You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper

ChuckMcM 9y ago

This is a pretty amazing example. It raises more questions than it answers however. The big one is "Why continue working in SF with this horrible commute?" Market dynamics suggest that in a 'free' market, on an individual basis, a person seeks to maximize their value received. So in this case, if this was an open market, the (commute + $81K/year) > any other option that she might choose. So what are we missing that there isn't at least an equal paying job available in the Central Valley that would cut her commute by 80 - 90% ? I can imagine lots of things that might contribute like pension eligibility, or specialization. But "Public Health Advisor for DHHS" seems to be a position that is available in many cities in the state. I would have liked to read what about this job in this city was so important. And all of that is to the meta question of salary growth has been flat for a long time, but for a long time people felt they had to keep their job at all costs. A what point does the advantage change? 3% unemployment? 2%? What needs to happen so that people are confident enough to say "pay me more or I'll work somewhere else." ? As a result of the stuff I wonder about, I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. And I wonder what happens when it snaps. Do we get the 10 - 15% stag-flation of the 70s?

tmpdude01 9y ago
I immediately searched for the word "pension" in the comments, and your comment was the only one to have it. She's 62 years old, and commuting to this job so that she can maximize her pension. https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/retirement-benefits https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/r...
- cbcoutinho 9y ago
  Getting through tough times is much easier with an end in sight and incentives to keep going. This is truly the right answer
pnathan 9y ago
> I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. Seattle, by any number of metrics, is one of the Boomtowns in America today. But when you walk down almost all the major streets, there are usually at least one boarded up storefront. House prices are > 10x annual US median salary, and 5-7x the median Seattle salary. Homeless people are everywhere downtown. The "family size" apartments are nearly non-existent until you get a solid 30+ minutes away (everything is being aimed at rich people or young singles); single family houses are (comfortably) priced to people with a solid 200k+ combined salary (you CAN stretch it of course, but memories of prior bubbles suggest stretching it on living situations is a poor choice). This isn't making sense: it does not seem sustainable as a system. Haven't dug into the numbers for Seattle, but the blue collar factories in the US etc are being pinched by a lack of entrants: no one wants to work for $12/hr and be at the bottom of the totem pole, but the employers claim they can't pay more. I read newspaper stories about this periodically. Structurally, of course, there is significant financial inequality between municipalities/states/cities and more rural areas, and the concentration of wealth (jobs, culture, hope) in these metro areas is generating salt lake effects in many rural areas. I think there's a definite snapping point in the economy that the current direction doesn't seem to be changing. I think, frankly, the US economy has metaphorical 'toxic' areas that haven't been honestly addressed and it's generating a lot of resentment.

suenyoj 9y ago

SELF DRIVING CARS is the solution. Just go sleep in your car and 3 hours later you can start working.

ProfessorLayton 9y ago

I don't dispute that Bay Area housing is very expensive, and there are plenty of issue it needs to address, but this person seems so have made a personal choice to have that commute, which I commend if thats the lifestyle she wants. Perhaps her personal circumstances didn't allow for it (Or she chose not to, which is fine too), but a home can be purchased for as little as 3.5% down (FHA) + closing costs. For someone with an 81K salary, their borrowing limit is around ~460k (@43% FHA DTI Limit [1]), and in 2014 (When the person in the article was evicted) there were plenty of homes in that price range in the East Bay. That DTI won't be easy, but neither is a 6-8hr daily commute. In fact, there are homes/condos right now [2] still in that price range. The crisis is for those making the median household income of say, 52.9K in Oakland, thats the income where one is basically shut out of the housing market. [1] https://www.fha.com/fha_requirements_debt https://www.fha.com/fha_requirements_debt [2] https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/filter/property-type=house+condo+townhouse,min-price=100k,max-price=400k,viewport=37.93869:37.57279:-121.89166:-122.579,no-outline https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/filter/property...

kamaal 9y ago

Just playing the devils advocate by posting some themes discussed on the article's comment section. - She apparently can't relocate as she makes $81K as a federal employee. Most commenters seem to point out they make far less for equally brutal commute, and don't even complain. - She also works from home every now and then. Something which most other people like Chefs, Janitors, Barbers who are paid way less, don't even have an option to do by very occupational design. - She qualifies for pension after some time. There fore it's not too much to expect somebody to make a little sacrifice for a few decades worth of getting paid without doing anything at all. - Most other commenters seem to point out that they would love to have a job which pays $81K, with benefits and a pension even at that commute time. Therefore this is not a problem, this is actually an opportunity. Most comments seem to have a 'Cry me a river' kind of a sentiment.