4 ms·
Because cost are going up across the board throughout the Bay Area, and the transportation infrastructure - both automotive and otherwise - hasn't kept up. Mov
by 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 agoI 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 agoWhere 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.
- DamnYuppie 12y agoThere are many affordable and large and fast growing cities with great pay. Dallas, Houston, Boise, and SLC to name a few.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- curun1r 12y agoI think you're reading more into his comment than what was intended. He didn't ask, "Why don't these people just move to more affordable places and still work in San Francisco?" I live in SF and I find it to be a really nice place, but if I was making minimum wage or anywhere near it, I'd never choose to live here. Those kinds of jobs are available in other parts of the country.
- x0x0 12y agoAnd long commutes mean you're very exposed to gas prices. When our next little middle east adventure starts, or isis wins in iraq, or putin uses oil prices to negotiate with the EU, or whatever it is, the same folks whose FYIGM attitude means people who can't handle their housing prices doubling in 5 years have to leave -- will be saying, "They should have known not to get a long commute and expose themselves to gas prices like that."