6 ms·

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

by TheAceOfHearts 12y ago

remarkEon 12y ago
Ok. Where?
- bequanna 12y ago
  If you're looking for affordable housing, it would probably be wise to look anywhere other than SF: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensive-than-new-york-city-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensi... The East Bay is only a 45 min BART ride away from downtown, and considerably cheaper.
  - selectodude 12y ago
    Only coming from personal experience, that $1737 number for a 1bed in Chicago is very high and makes me question the rest of their numbers.
    - remarkEon 12y ago
      Currently living in Seattle and their numbers seem pretty spot on anecdotally for what people are paying now, though a few of my friends are looking and they have found nothing under $2500 for a 2 bedroom. Seattle I think is going to be a city to watch closely the next few years for similar types of housing strife we see in SF. Once all the Amazon construction is complete it's going to get awfully crowded awfully fast.
DanBC 12y ago
How does a homeless person afford the travel to a "more affordable" place? (What does more affordable mean when they have no money?) Where do the nurses, teachers, security guards, waiters, shop assistants etc etc live?
- clarkm 12y ago
  Well, the first guy profiled could've used his "his savings and his investments" and his "daughter's college fund" to move instead of spending it all on rent. Downsizing is a pretty common occurrence in most parts of the country, but in SF there's really not much to downsize to.
  - ReadyCollective 12y ago
    If you're connected to the community you live in (coaching, etc), your child's doing well in a good school, it becomes easy to extend yourself "one more week" in order to maintain that, hoping things will change - and then past the "oh shit" moment you realize you're past the point of effectively affording to move and restart life. Plus, in 2009, i don't think there were places to move to to get an easy job. The guy did apply to 800 places...
- panzagl 12y ago
  I don't know how the homeless travel, but they do. After all, they get to SF somehow.
- johnny_utah 12y ago
  One example -> the city of San Francisco offers bus tickets home for homeless people who have relatives or friends in another town who are willing to take them in. The program is called "Homeward Bound." Source: http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm
GauntletWizard 12y ago
Because they have roots and history in SF and the valley. They've got friends, family, and memories there. It's hard to give up your home. It's those tech upstarts that're causing all the trouble; Moving there en-masse, with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! Really, it's no different from casual racism, but you've got to understand the roots: Fear of the unknown is a powerful motivating factor for most people.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! This is a straw man. It's the "tech upstarts" money and their willingness to spend it like water that's disruptive, and not because it makes them "troublemakers" but because it makes local rents rise to multiples of what they were before. It's very much different than casual racism. edit: it's very silly and reality TV drama to think of this as a personality conflict. It's a rent going from $2K to $5K in 5 years conflict.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    The attitude is little different. How dare those outgroup people challenge the way things are done!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
DannyBee 12y ago
Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. There are a lot of issues with this article. It talks about the Ellis act as if it isn't standard in every other part of the country. (in fact, the only thing non-standard is the state of the world pre-ellis act, where landlords in california could never evict people and decide to stop being landlords)
- warfangle 12y ago
  The Ellis Act is kind of fucked up, dude. It's _not_ standard in every other part of the country. It pegs the buyout price of a unit by law, and hasn't been increased in quite a while. Compare to how it works in Brooklyn: If your landlord wants to evict you without cause, they must purchase your lease from you at a price which you can negotiate. It's much more difficult (and can be costlier) to evict you _for_ cause here. In a gentrifying area, tenants have been known to negotiate lease buyouts at upwards of six figures - and there have been some lease buyouts in the $MM range. > never evict people and decide to stop being landlords This is a pretty huge misconception. It's evicting people _in order to_ stop being landlords. E.g., converting a rental building to condos or single-family housing. It's a cheap way to cash in on skyrocketing real estate: the most you'll ever pay to evict someone is $18,000 a unit. In most sane places, if a landlord wants to go out of business / quit being a landlord, they must sell the property to another landlord. They can't just say "oops, you guys need to all leave now!" For good reasons. Even red states like NC have pretty strict restrictions on when you can evict a tenant, and "'Cause I'm shutting down the LLC" is never one of them.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    NC has a restriction on evicting a tenant at the end of a lease term? It has mandatory lease renewal?
  - msandford 12y ago
    So what happens when the company that owns the property goes bankrupt because, say, it can't raise rents? Does the state step in and buy the property so everyone can live there? If the company goes bankrupt then the building is probably put up for sale, and could get sold to a developer rather than another landlord right? Seems like a fairly straightforward end-run around the law. You go bankrupt in your building and I'll buy it at auction for some price, and the reverse. Unintended consequences are everywhere as a result of laws like this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- DannyBee 12y ago
  While the desire may be rational, believing society can make this desire can come true is probably not rational. At some point, you run out of places to put all the people who want to live in a given place. You have to have some way of deciding who gets to live there, and to be honest, "blood right" doesn't do it for me.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    San Francisco does things to make the desire even less rational, in the name of maintaining civic character and political status quo. Not just building restrictions, but management of core services (particularly transit). It's hellaciously expensive to live in Manhattan, but viable for many low-wage workers with jobs in Manhattan to live in NY Metro.
- baddox 12y ago
  Weird. I didn't stay where I was born.
smutticus 12y ago
Why don't people in the bay area allow cheap housing to be built in their community? Why can't we have giant apartment complexes in the bay area?
- pcwalton 12y ago
  Any or all of (a) because it keeps housing prices high, working to the advantage of those who own property; (b) because low density is easy to tie into environmental/quality of life concerns; (c) because the culture is deeply distrustful of market-based solutions, such as market-rate housing.
jmaha 12y ago
It's not exactly that straight forward... As mentioned in the article, many who work full time in SF can't afford to live in the city. "Affordable places" generally means far east or south of their workplace, meaning that they have to spend an enormous amount of money and time commuting to their jobs. With time and money being a finite resource [for most], the commute time comes at the cost of family time and the cost of transportation comes out of their meager earnings (a fact that, if you live in SF or work at a company that provides a private bus, take for granted). Living outside of the city is still unaffordable for many people because of these costs. The real problem is the scarcity of overall housing resources. With the boom in tech drawing more and more people into SF, it's only going to become more of an issue unless building picks up significantly. This is also true of salaries, which will have to increase in order for companies to hire people who can afford to live here, further driving a wedge between those who can and those who cannot live here.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- bequanna 12y ago
  Having lived in other large US cities, I am always astounded by the number, brazenness, and aggressiveness of SF's homeless population. From my (anecdotal) observations, poor police enforcement appears to be a motivator for homeless people to gather and remain in SF. Walk a couple laps around City Hall and count the number of misdemeanors you can spot in the open and homeless 'tents'. Most other cities don't allow anything of the sort.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Yes, they send their homeless people to SF instead. http://www.ksby.com/news/san-francisco-suing-nevada-for-allegedly-shipping-homeless-to-california/ http://www.ksby.com/news/san-francisco-suing-nevada-for-alle...
drivingmenuts 12y ago
> Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job. If you're rich, moving is always an option. If you're not rich or have no financial cushion, you are well and truly stuck. I just went through a bout of homelessness. What money I did have, I had to spend on gas, food and minimal rent to stay in the area, because the option was going back home where the high-paying job is Walmart or a prison. And by high-paying, I mean around $28K a year, if you're lucky.
- bequanna 12y ago
  >It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job. This just doesn't make any sense to me. So, you're homeless and jobless. You're saying I shouldn't somewhere else because 'it's too expensive to find a job'? These people have an emotional attachment to SF, I get that and absolutely sympathize. The reality is there are many, many jobs in the Bay Area and plenty of them are close to affordable housing. Additionally, if they want to spend time downtown, most places in the bay are no more than an hour via public transport.
  - squidbot 12y ago
    I think what the parent was saying was that you literally can't afford to go elsewhere to find a job. When you don't have money to pay your rent, you likely don't have the money to: - Pay for airfare and a hotel to go out for a job interview (these types of jobs aren't flying you out and putting you in a hotel) - Have living expenses to cover you for the time it takes to find a new job in the area (the types of jobs we're talking about here don't give you a relocation allowance) - Rent a truck and gas to move a long distance (certainly not to pay a moving company) - Pay first and last months rent and deposit Moving is often "free" for the types of jobs the typical HN reader would have, the company trying to recruit you would pay all of the above. These aren't the types of jobs people discussed in the article have or can get. They are effectively stuck unless they take a huge, potentially even more devastating risk, or are fortunate enough to have some sort of a support network where they are hoping to move to, like family or good friends willing to let you couch surf for a while.
potatolicious 12y ago
Because cost are going up across the board throughout the Bay Area, and the transportation infrastructure - both automotive and otherwise - hasn't kept up. Moving further means increased commuting cost. For drivers this comes in the form of massively increased fuel costs. For transit users this comes in the form of increased fares, since BART practices distance-based pricing. Commuting daily from Fremont to SF costs $12, that's over 1h of minimum wage. Imagine if you had to pay 10-15% of your total income (pre-tax!) just to get to work. More if you're unable to get a full 8h of work a day. Moving further also means a large reduction in disposal free time. Free time is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the poor though - since the time isn't actually free. The article touches on this at a few points - the working poor require a lot of government subsidies and aid organizations for survival, all of which takes time, and most of which are located in SF. One of the key inhibitors in helping people out of homelessness is, to be simplistic, lining up for things. The basic services they need to survive have huge lines to access them, making a large proportion of their lives idling in a waiting room, waiting for one necessary thing after another. Imagine the DMV, but every day, and multiple times a day. All of this exacerbated by living far away. Not only are you waiting around forever for basic things, you're now spending more time to get there in the first place. Even to a rational, completely-informed actor (an unsafe assumption, to say the least), the economics of living further away may not actually work.
- Oculus 12y ago
  I don't think they mean move to a place more affordable out side of SF, but move away from SF to another part of the country.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    Where though? At the end we're really talking about arbitrage. Places with jobs are expensive to live in, places that are cheap to live in don't have jobs. There's no way to win, except maybe temporarily exploiting an arbitrage opportunity (i.e., a place with jobs but the cost of living hasn't caught up yet). Expecting people to do this is unreliable at an individual level, and disastrous as public policy. Ultimately the only mid- to long-term solution is to help make job centers cheaper to live in.
astrocat 12y ago
Many may interpret this as victim blaming but I think it's a valid question: why have we as a country/culture become so much more resistant to moving? I know I've read more comprehensive literature on this before a but a quick google brought up these starting points: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/11/declining_american_mobility_an_ongoing_mystery.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/11/declining_ame... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generation-stuck-why-dont-young-people-move-anymore/254349/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generati... I understand that we develop local support networks of friends and family and it's easy to understand why moving comes with the fear of having to start in a new place with no such network. But it seems that this fear has become limiting - that we are now refusing to relocate to places where greater opportunity exists because we can't stand the thought of leaving our current network behind. We're stuck, effectively. And it exacerbates the conditions in places like SF.
- HarryHirsch 12y ago
  it seems that this fear has become limiting A network of friends and family for such things as childcare and temporary accomodation is worth dollars. If you can leave your son/daughter with their grandmother while at work or can find a couch at a friend's house while between jobs you can put up with lower local wages. To move elsewhere, the new job would have to pay enough for childcare and to allow to build a cushion of savings. A sympathetic ear and a can of beers is also worth a lot. Often, on this board, we read of burnout and nervous breakdowns. The decision not to move doesn't seem to come from fear, on the contrary, it's rational, elsewhere life isn't going to be better, and very possibly worse. At the low end of the wage spectrum there is no opportunity left anywhere in the nation.
  - astrocat 12y ago
    All this is true, and very understandable. But the question remains, why is it NOW more common to stay put rather than relocate? What is it about the modern environment that makes people so much more reluctant to pick up and move? With all the benefits of modern communication and technology that makes maintaining social connections over distances and receiving financial support from anywhere so easy, you'd think it'd be easier to move than before when leaving really meant "leaving."
jseliger 12y ago
Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? In many cases, they are: most often to Sunbelt cities like Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, which are the fastest growing in percentage terms in the nation (See Matt Yglesias at http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/14/in_the_future_everyone_will_live_in_texas.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/14/in_the_future... or http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/23/fastest_growing_cities_in_america.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/23/fastest_growi...). Yglesias also details some of this in The Rent Is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&l... -- a must read on these issues, and I usually post a link when discussions like this one arise). Anyway, lots of cities have dysfunctional political and legal systems that prevent the supply of housing from growing. San Francisco's problems are particularly acute: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/ http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/... and are exacerbated by rent control, which discourages owners from even utilizing existing space.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

remarkEon 12y ago

Ok. Where?

bequanna 12y ago
If you're looking for affordable housing, it would probably be wise to look anywhere other than SF: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensive-than-new-york-city-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensi... The East Bay is only a 45 min BART ride away from downtown, and considerably cheaper.
- selectodude 12y ago
  Only coming from personal experience, that $1737 number for a 1bed in Chicago is very high and makes me question the rest of their numbers.
  - remarkEon 12y ago
    Currently living in Seattle and their numbers seem pretty spot on anecdotally for what people are paying now, though a few of my friends are looking and they have found nothing under $2500 for a 2 bedroom. Seattle I think is going to be a city to watch closely the next few years for similar types of housing strife we see in SF. Once all the Amazon construction is complete it's going to get awfully crowded awfully fast.

DanBC 12y ago

How does a homeless person afford the travel to a "more affordable" place? (What does more affordable mean when they have no money?) Where do the nurses, teachers, security guards, waiters, shop assistants etc etc live?

clarkm 12y ago
Well, the first guy profiled could've used his "his savings and his investments" and his "daughter's college fund" to move instead of spending it all on rent. Downsizing is a pretty common occurrence in most parts of the country, but in SF there's really not much to downsize to.
- ReadyCollective 12y ago
  If you're connected to the community you live in (coaching, etc), your child's doing well in a good school, it becomes easy to extend yourself "one more week" in order to maintain that, hoping things will change - and then past the "oh shit" moment you realize you're past the point of effectively affording to move and restart life. Plus, in 2009, i don't think there were places to move to to get an easy job. The guy did apply to 800 places...
panzagl 12y ago
I don't know how the homeless travel, but they do. After all, they get to SF somehow.
johnny_utah 12y ago
One example -> the city of San Francisco offers bus tickets home for homeless people who have relatives or friends in another town who are willing to take them in. The program is called "Homeward Bound." Source: http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm

GauntletWizard 12y ago

Because they have roots and history in SF and the valley. They've got friends, family, and memories there. It's hard to give up your home. It's those tech upstarts that're causing all the trouble; Moving there en-masse, with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! Really, it's no different from casual racism, but you've got to understand the roots: Fear of the unknown is a powerful motivating factor for most people.

pessimizer 12y ago
>with their strange ways and disrespect for the local culture. Always trying to "disrupt"; they're obviously troublemakers! This is a straw man. It's the "tech upstarts" money and their willingness to spend it like water that's disruptive, and not because it makes them "troublemakers" but because it makes local rents rise to multiples of what they were before. It's very much different than casual racism. edit: it's very silly and reality TV drama to think of this as a personality conflict. It's a rent going from $2K to $5K in 5 years conflict.
- Kalium 12y ago
  The attitude is little different. How dare those outgroup people challenge the way things are done!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

DannyBee 12y ago

Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. There are a lot of issues with this article. It talks about the Ellis act as if it isn't standard in every other part of the country. (in fact, the only thing non-standard is the state of the world pre-ellis act, where landlords in california could never evict people and decide to stop being landlords)

warfangle 12y ago
The Ellis Act is kind of fucked up, dude. It's _not_ standard in every other part of the country. It pegs the buyout price of a unit by law, and hasn't been increased in quite a while. Compare to how it works in Brooklyn: If your landlord wants to evict you without cause, they must purchase your lease from you at a price which you can negotiate. It's much more difficult (and can be costlier) to evict you _for_ cause here. In a gentrifying area, tenants have been known to negotiate lease buyouts at upwards of six figures - and there have been some lease buyouts in the $MM range. > never evict people and decide to stop being landlords This is a pretty huge misconception. It's evicting people _in order to_ stop being landlords. E.g., converting a rental building to condos or single-family housing. It's a cheap way to cash in on skyrocketing real estate: the most you'll ever pay to evict someone is $18,000 a unit. In most sane places, if a landlord wants to go out of business / quit being a landlord, they must sell the property to another landlord. They can't just say "oops, you guys need to all leave now!" For good reasons. Even red states like NC have pretty strict restrictions on when you can evict a tenant, and "'Cause I'm shutting down the LLC" is never one of them.
- tptacek 12y ago
  NC has a restriction on evicting a tenant at the end of a lease term? It has mandatory lease renewal?
- msandford 12y ago
  So what happens when the company that owns the property goes bankrupt because, say, it can't raise rents? Does the state step in and buy the property so everyone can live there? If the company goes bankrupt then the building is probably put up for sale, and could get sold to a developer rather than another landlord right? Seems like a fairly straightforward end-run around the law. You go bankrupt in your building and I'll buy it at auction for some price, and the reverse. Unintended consequences are everywhere as a result of laws like this.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

DannyBee 12y ago
While the desire may be rational, believing society can make this desire can come true is probably not rational. At some point, you run out of places to put all the people who want to live in a given place. You have to have some way of deciding who gets to live there, and to be honest, "blood right" doesn't do it for me.
- tptacek 12y ago
  San Francisco does things to make the desire even less rational, in the name of maintaining civic character and political status quo. Not just building restrictions, but management of core services (particularly transit). It's hellaciously expensive to live in Manhattan, but viable for many low-wage workers with jobs in Manhattan to live in NY Metro.
baddox 12y ago
Weird. I didn't stay where I was born.

smutticus 12y ago

Why don't people in the bay area allow cheap housing to be built in their community? Why can't we have giant apartment complexes in the bay area?

pcwalton 12y ago
Any or all of (a) because it keeps housing prices high, working to the advantage of those who own property; (b) because low density is easy to tie into environmental/quality of life concerns; (c) because the culture is deeply distrustful of market-based solutions, such as market-rate housing.

jmaha 12y ago

It's not exactly that straight forward... As mentioned in the article, many who work full time in SF can't afford to live in the city. "Affordable places" generally means far east or south of their workplace, meaning that they have to spend an enormous amount of money and time commuting to their jobs. With time and money being a finite resource [for most], the commute time comes at the cost of family time and the cost of transportation comes out of their meager earnings (a fact that, if you live in SF or work at a company that provides a private bus, take for granted). Living outside of the city is still unaffordable for many people because of these costs. The real problem is the scarcity of overall housing resources. With the boom in tech drawing more and more people into SF, it's only going to become more of an issue unless building picks up significantly. This is also true of salaries, which will have to increase in order for companies to hire people who can afford to live here, further driving a wedge between those who can and those who cannot live here.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bequanna 12y ago
Having lived in other large US cities, I am always astounded by the number, brazenness, and aggressiveness of SF's homeless population. From my (anecdotal) observations, poor police enforcement appears to be a motivator for homeless people to gather and remain in SF. Walk a couple laps around City Hall and count the number of misdemeanors you can spot in the open and homeless 'tents'. Most other cities don't allow anything of the sort.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Yes, they send their homeless people to SF instead. http://www.ksby.com/news/san-francisco-suing-nevada-for-allegedly-shipping-homeless-to-california/ http://www.ksby.com/news/san-francisco-suing-nevada-for-alle...

drivingmenuts 12y ago

> Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job. If you're rich, moving is always an option. If you're not rich or have no financial cushion, you are well and truly stuck. I just went through a bout of homelessness. What money I did have, I had to spend on gas, food and minimal rent to stay in the area, because the option was going back home where the high-paying job is Walmart or a prison. And by high-paying, I mean around $28K a year, if you're lucky.

bequanna 12y ago
>It's not a viable solution to just "go somewhere more affordable" when you don't have the money to leave and there are no jobs where housing is more affordable. What you save in housing costs would be eaten up or exceeded by the cost of just getting to a job. This just doesn't make any sense to me. So, you're homeless and jobless. You're saying I shouldn't somewhere else because 'it's too expensive to find a job'? These people have an emotional attachment to SF, I get that and absolutely sympathize. The reality is there are many, many jobs in the Bay Area and plenty of them are close to affordable housing. Additionally, if they want to spend time downtown, most places in the bay are no more than an hour via public transport.
- squidbot 12y ago
  I think what the parent was saying was that you literally can't afford to go elsewhere to find a job. When you don't have money to pay your rent, you likely don't have the money to: - Pay for airfare and a hotel to go out for a job interview (these types of jobs aren't flying you out and putting you in a hotel) - Have living expenses to cover you for the time it takes to find a new job in the area (the types of jobs we're talking about here don't give you a relocation allowance) - Rent a truck and gas to move a long distance (certainly not to pay a moving company) - Pay first and last months rent and deposit Moving is often "free" for the types of jobs the typical HN reader would have, the company trying to recruit you would pay all of the above. These aren't the types of jobs people discussed in the article have or can get. They are effectively stuck unless they take a huge, potentially even more devastating risk, or are fortunate enough to have some sort of a support network where they are hoping to move to, like family or good friends willing to let you couch surf for a while.

potatolicious 12y ago

Because cost are going up across the board throughout the Bay Area, and the transportation infrastructure - both automotive and otherwise - hasn't kept up. Moving further means increased commuting cost. For drivers this comes in the form of massively increased fuel costs. For transit users this comes in the form of increased fares, since BART practices distance-based pricing. Commuting daily from Fremont to SF costs $12, that's over 1h of minimum wage. Imagine if you had to pay 10-15% of your total income (pre-tax!) just to get to work. More if you're unable to get a full 8h of work a day. Moving further also means a large reduction in disposal free time. Free time is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the poor though - since the time isn't actually free. The article touches on this at a few points - the working poor require a lot of government subsidies and aid organizations for survival, all of which takes time, and most of which are located in SF. One of the key inhibitors in helping people out of homelessness is, to be simplistic, lining up for things. The basic services they need to survive have huge lines to access them, making a large proportion of their lives idling in a waiting room, waiting for one necessary thing after another. Imagine the DMV, but every day, and multiple times a day. All of this exacerbated by living far away. Not only are you waiting around forever for basic things, you're now spending more time to get there in the first place. Even to a rational, completely-informed actor (an unsafe assumption, to say the least), the economics of living further away may not actually work.

Oculus 12y ago
I don't think they mean move to a place more affordable out side of SF, but move away from SF to another part of the country.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Where though? At the end we're really talking about arbitrage. Places with jobs are expensive to live in, places that are cheap to live in don't have jobs. There's no way to win, except maybe temporarily exploiting an arbitrage opportunity (i.e., a place with jobs but the cost of living hasn't caught up yet). Expecting people to do this is unreliable at an individual level, and disastrous as public policy. Ultimately the only mid- to long-term solution is to help make job centers cheaper to live in.

astrocat 12y ago

Many may interpret this as victim blaming but I think it's a valid question: why have we as a country/culture become so much more resistant to moving? I know I've read more comprehensive literature on this before a but a quick google brought up these starting points: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/11/declining_american_mobility_an_ongoing_mystery.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/11/declining_ame... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generation-stuck-why-dont-young-people-move-anymore/254349/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generati... I understand that we develop local support networks of friends and family and it's easy to understand why moving comes with the fear of having to start in a new place with no such network. But it seems that this fear has become limiting - that we are now refusing to relocate to places where greater opportunity exists because we can't stand the thought of leaving our current network behind. We're stuck, effectively. And it exacerbates the conditions in places like SF.

HarryHirsch 12y ago
it seems that this fear has become limiting A network of friends and family for such things as childcare and temporary accomodation is worth dollars. If you can leave your son/daughter with their grandmother while at work or can find a couch at a friend's house while between jobs you can put up with lower local wages. To move elsewhere, the new job would have to pay enough for childcare and to allow to build a cushion of savings. A sympathetic ear and a can of beers is also worth a lot. Often, on this board, we read of burnout and nervous breakdowns. The decision not to move doesn't seem to come from fear, on the contrary, it's rational, elsewhere life isn't going to be better, and very possibly worse. At the low end of the wage spectrum there is no opportunity left anywhere in the nation.
- astrocat 12y ago
  All this is true, and very understandable. But the question remains, why is it NOW more common to stay put rather than relocate? What is it about the modern environment that makes people so much more reluctant to pick up and move? With all the benefits of modern communication and technology that makes maintaining social connections over distances and receiving financial support from anywhere so easy, you'd think it'd be easier to move than before when leaving really meant "leaving."

jseliger 12y ago

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? In many cases, they are: most often to Sunbelt cities like Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, which are the fastest growing in percentage terms in the nation (See Matt Yglesias at http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/14/in_the_future_everyone_will_live_in_texas.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/14/in_the_future... or http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/23/fastest_growing_cities_in_america.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/23/fastest_growi...). Yglesias also details some of this in The Rent Is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&l... -- a must read on these issues, and I usually post a link when discussions like this one arise). Anyway, lots of cities have dysfunctional political and legal systems that prevent the supply of housing from growing. San Francisco's problems are particularly acute: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/7205/ http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/... and are exacerbated by rent control, which discourages owners from even utilizing existing space.

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