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This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move? If you are the head of a large household living in an area where the cost of living is too hi

This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move? If you are the head of a large household living in an area where the cost of living is too high to support your dependents, you would do a whole lot of good for them and yourself by starting new in some other part of the country. At the very least it would be wise to relocate across the Bay. I realize that people have families, social networks, and small-scale culture that they don't want to separate from. It's a sad reality, but sometimes the economic forces that re-balance labor markets require people to physically relocate. If your labor is not as valuable in a particular geographic region, it's time to retrain or move. For most people retraining is not an option... My sentiment is not classist or elitist. The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically. I did all this with very little money saved up and with no financial support outside my paycheck. It has been easier for me to keep in touch with my family than it would be for these people (I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year). However, I have made sacrifices and relocated for my personal financial well-being. If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more. EDIT: That being said, I fully support relaxing regulation on the construction of new housing. It would be better if people didn't have to move, but I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV.

kaonashi 12y ago
Thanks for illustrating the attitudes that make these kinds of situations possible.
- mawburn 12y ago
  I've moved plenty in my life, both as a child and as an adult. The most common reason people don't move is because they are afraid to leave the social circles. And what a lot of people don't realize is that their their social circles may not actually be that strong anymore now that they have become adults and had children... which then it just comes down to them being afraid or "just don't want to". Of course there are an infinite number of other factors involved, especially when money is thrown into it, but this has been my experience when talking with people.
SoftwareMaven 12y ago
It costs a lot to move, especially when you are unskilled and have no idea if you will be able to find employment wherever you end up. It is made worse when you are participating in any sort of social safety net because you don't know if you'll have that available when you get wherever the grass is greener. And that says nothing about social and familial networks.
- benten10 12y ago
  Thank you! I can see how one might feel 'just move' is a good argument, but really NO! In chinatowns all over the country, whenever low-income residents are being priced out, the argument is always 'you can just find another place to stay'. They've lived there for decades, if not more. That's where all the people they know are. They are poor but they do have a support system, that lives with them. When they move away, not only are they economically helpless, but also socially helpless. To tell people to just 'move away' is very dense, IMHO. You might not feel the same way about places you live in, but some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live. Consider the fact that when there's natural disasters/flood/earthquake/radiation leaks, there's not insignificant percentage of people who would rather stay where they are and suffer the consequences rather than move away. Which is why evacuations often have to be FORCED! People would rather die than move away from their homes. You cannot just say 'they can just move away': the concerns are valid.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    > some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live Those feelings are a luxury. Taxpayers should not be forced to bear the cost of someone's emotional attachments. I would prefer tax dollars be spent on relocation assistance + job placement to help get people on a sustainable path.
    - benten10 12y ago
      I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out. In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.
coderzach 12y ago
> My sentiment is not classist or elitist. You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there. Got it. > The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic background. Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
- cjensen 12y ago
  I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your property which is risky compared to living somewhere else and having diverse investments and savings. The advice makes sense for the rich as well as the poor.
  - chaqke 12y ago
    Financial sense depends on how you price the benefits of living in this area vs other areas. For example, being near family is a a benefit...so is being near people who care about technology, if that matters to you. Consider being a programmer in several startups over 5 years vs being a programmer in a large bank. There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose. I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it. Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.
  - bsder 12y ago
    > It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101. This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city--when (not if) you get laid off. Seagate had this problem a couple years ago. They wanted VLSI layout people in Pittsburgh and were offering comparable to Silicon Valley money--and nobody from the tech cities would bite. Why? Everybody knew that they were going to be the most highly paid people in the office and subject to getting axed first. And would then have to move back to Silicon Valley.
codemac 12y ago
Moving is expensive too. If you're hand-to-mouth poor, you cannot afford a rental truck, let alone time off work and still feed your children. You will probably lose your job if you move, and not find another one where you land, especially if you're in the service industry. Good luck with that East bay -> peninsula commute on your minimum wage. The reason many cannot get jobs other places is due to felonies or other legal issues related to being poor. If your children are in school a lot of parents would actually rather struggle than put their family through the trauma of a move, even if in the end it may be better. American society is more mobile than others, but poverty (outside of vagrancy) is extremely restricting. I do think your main thesis is correct (this is unmaintainable, gtfo), but moving is a multi-year struggle of planning and saving at these low levels of income. This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness.
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  Assuming government resources are needed to be spent to help resolve this, would they not be put to better use helping individuals relocate to somewhere sustainable (especially those who would be making a living wage elsewhere) than to subsidize the difference year after year?
  - nsnick 12y ago
    Lets not forget that these people would be middle class anywhere else.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Lets not forget that these people would be middle class anywhere else. If they could magically keep their Bay Area income while being anywhere else, they might be. But since they can't actually do that, I'm not sure what relevance that has.
      - 12y ago
Domenic_S 12y ago
I was sitting here trying to figure out how to say basically the same thing. Growing up my dad had a good job but we never were able to afford to live in $NEAREST_METRO_AREA, so we always lived a commute away -- sometimes a long commute away. Charity idea: provide moving & job placement help to get homeless or nearly homeless families into lower cost of living areas. I always have mixed feelings about stories like this. Like the woman from the first video: homeless, just got a garage for her and her 18-month-old. Pregnant again. Kids do not make your financial situation better or life less stressful. The kids didn't ask for poverty and it's not their fault -- all true. But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?
- bobmagoo 12y ago
  Being a parent I have tons of empathy for how hard life is for single parents. That said, I really lost a lot of sympathy for the woman in the garage though, kids are hugely expensive (about a quarter million dollars to raise them to 18) and I just can't understand how she thought having a second kid would improve her situation. Obviously it could have been an accident or similar, but damn, maybe now isn't the right time for a second kid! I'm probably just a first world asshole with no sense of what it must be like in her position.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    The striking thing to me is that it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Living in a garage while trying to look after an infant is likely to be a big drain on cognitive resources. It's easy for you and me to sit here and say what a bad idea this is - obviously we all enjoy enough economic freedom to sit here chit-chatting about economic policy for a few minutes in the middle of the daytime. When you don't have existential anxieties crowding in on you, such things seem so simple and obvious. It would be a very different calculus if any of us were in that woman's situation. Maybe she made a bad decision. Maybe someone told her she'd be much more likely to get public assistance with two children than one, and she's ashamed to admit it. Maybe she was coerced into sex in exchange for money or because her personal safety was threatened. I very much doubt that she just decided it was a Friday, and a good time to get her sexy on.
jcdavis 12y ago
You mean well, but its easy to forget that moving a family a long distance costs a nontrivial amount of money, even if you do it on the cheap. Maybe not a problem for you or me, but much more so for a family already barely scraping by.
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  Nontrivial, but how does it compare to the 100K a year the article mentioned needed to life them out of poverty? 5K to move and then 20K a year to lift them out of poverty in a different area would allow us to help far more families.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
"I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV" The word optimal is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting here.
xbryanx 12y ago
Are you suggesting they move to Latvia? The country just below us(US) in childhood poverty rates?
larrys 12y ago
"This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move?" The other question is (don't know the answer) how many people who owned homes (instead of renting) were able to cash in in some way on rising property values? My guess is that at least some of the people renting made the decision to not purchase and some of the people owning made the decision to not rent. Of the people who could choose an option. As far as people saying "it costs money to move" what about one family member moving and the other staying until a life is established elsewhere? [1] Maybe what is needed instead of handouts is some kind of social service that makes people aware of their options. Edit: And pushes them to take those options even if they are painful. And also to make them realize that "even though you don't want to move because your friends and family are here" you might have to move if you can't afford this place anymore. Note: I don't live in California and have no skin in this game. [1] And lastly, has the "problem" even been properly quantified? I watch stories similar to this on TV news reports. They always pick the right people that you seem to be able to relate to and a situation that always seems unjust. But they never show exactly how many people actually are like that person (or even not like that person). They pull at your emotional heartstrings because their job is to make the story attractive, not necessarily balanced. And when they do they always add the "to be sure" that gets them off the hook. As in "to be sure not everyone who is homeless is XYZ" etc.
- unreal37 12y ago
  One of the most shocking things I saw in the Philippines was exactly this. A mother living and working in a city as a nanny/maid, while her husband and children lived "back home" fairly far away. She saw them only a couple of times per year. That's some sacrifice she's making to put food on her family's table!
  - larrys 12y ago
    You also find that happens on certain cruise lines. A family works on a ship and send the money back home. I am guessing that some people think that there is so much money sloshing around the Valley that taxes should be higher to take care of those in need. The potential problem there is that you simply encourage more people to stay or actually even more people to move to the area to take advantage of that benefit.
subpixel 12y ago
A big problem with this concept is jobs. The working poor are almost exclusively employed in the service sector at or near minimum wage. Worse yet, many are essentially day laborers, even outside of the sort of fields normally associated with on-demand labor (to wit: startups like workpop.com and shiftgig.com are responding to market realities). Finding a food service or house cleaning or landscaping job in a depressed, but affordable, city like Redding or its ilk is going to be way, way harder than in a more expensive place. Add to this that once you lose your car, you can't live or work outside of a city with functional public transportation. None of those are cities are going to be dirt cheap.
- chaqke 12y ago
  Agree - and in addition, they may not have a 2-week buffer to find a new job even if it were available. They certainly aren't being flown in for interviews.
onion2k 12y ago
My sentiment is not classist or elitist. The fact you fail to recognise it as elitist doesn't mean it isn't. You are elitist because you fail to understand that life can be a great deal harder for other people. "I did it so they can too" assumes that other people don't live in circumstances that prevent them doing things. That is plain wrong. If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more. One of the things you might have had to sacrifice is having enough money to relocate.
- unreal37 12y ago
  I admit to not understanding the mindset. So I honestly want to understand it. One family in the article has two parents both with full time jobs. And they're living in a homeless shelter. I understand that they can't afford $3,000 per month rent in the city. But how is it that they don't have enough money to relocate? Even a few miles away to something more affordable? If the father works in construction, that's skill that is in high demand and easily transferable. You can walk into a construction office tomorrow and be swinging a hammer by Monday right? There must be more going on. Some important piece of the puzzle is being withheld from their story.
parfe 12y ago
Getting the poor out of the city won't be easy. They don't have enough capital to fund a relocation on their own. The government will probably need to ship them out on rail cars. Once the undesirables vacate their homes, those structures can be replaced with housing more fitting for the well-off residents of the city.
whybroke 12y ago
The value of your labor relative to housing is dropping every year too you know. The notion of re-balancing forces is a nice simple story but the price of housing relative to income has risen nationwide for decades. There is a similar story for medical care and even food. So yes it's fun to believe in the invisible hand and Adam Smith's 200 year old thesis. But the reality is that the value of all labor is simply being driven downward.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  For that matter, Adam Smith was a great deal more aware of structural factors and the lack of sustainability that would result from unrestrained pursuit of wealth -it's salutary that he titled his most famous work 'The Wealth of Nations' rather than 'The Wealth of Corporations.' Smith was keenly aware of the dangers of mercantilism and WoN is anything but an argument for unrestrained capitalism. Indeed, the second most observation in the book, after the one about the fact that butchers and bakers are motivated by self-interest rather than generosity, is that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
cyberpanther 12y ago
So if you look at the numbers actually tons of people are moving out of California. On the other hand tons of people are moving in too. However, I think the overall effect is Cailifornia is losing people every month.
pron 12y ago
Disregarding the question of the cost/possibility of moving, do we as a society want communities to be completely segregated based on income? Do we want poor kids to grow up without role models and good education opportunities? Do we want rich kids to grow up believing they somehow deserve all this, completely detached from the rest of society and the problems they face? The forces of the market are not the forces of nature, and we make the rules (or, at least, shape them greatly).
- nsnick 12y ago
  This is called social engineering.
  - pron 12y ago
    It actually has an older, more common, name: policy. Doing something and not doing something are both kinds of policy, and are both choices we make. Pretending that the market forces are somehow neutral or natural is factually false. They are nothing more than the product of a certain chosen policy.
amagumori 12y ago
> I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically. > I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year are you serious, dude? leave the advice giving for people who have actually been poor and understand the logistic difficulties of poverty. "just move"? you have the freedom to move to the most economically optimal place for you, and you think THAT is equivalent to the situation of a family living hand to mouth in transitional housing or section 8? YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
ccvannorman 12y ago
"Just Move?" I'd rather live out of my car (and have done so..briefly.) Together with my cofounders over two years we have built an amazing company and product (and we still have a ways to go). This would not be possible outside of Silicon Valley, and our trajectory would look much different (worse) if we lived in, say, Montana.
mc32 12y ago
This is a multi-faceted issue that has no easy fix. In the SF bay region the issue is exacerbated by convoluted politics perpetrated by residents and government. Locals steadfastedly oppose growth, even when most might agree it's for everyone's good. On the other hand, some sub areas are bound geographically and can't expand horizontally, so the only way is upwards, which faces even more resistance. On top of this, no one has a natural right to live in a specific area. At the same time society has a responsibility to provide reasonably affordable living space for lower income residents. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the posh areas of town. Still as land prices increase, is it even possible to build in areas of high land prices? Where does that money come from? Do we divert taxes to that effort rather than building that same housing in areas where that money would go further? With regard to people not being able to move away due to cost, there are lots of people who move to the US with nothing but a few dollars and an address. It's possible. I guess the question is do we want to put our own citizens in this kind of predicament?
adolfojp 12y ago
Our society can't operate without an integrated workforce and you can't have an integrated workforce if you segregate people based on their income. For every software engineer in the Bay Area there is an army of waiters, cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, retail workers, office workers, school teachers, nurses, and unskilled laborers that supports him. And if you move them all out, well, I don't think that I have to explain the consequences of that action.
- somebodyother 12y ago
  The Bay Area engineer is likely there to work for a company that obsoletes one or two of those unskilled laborers. I think the really scary part will be 10 years from now when everything's automated
r00fus 12y ago
Your sentiment is naive. People build up support structures - extended family, close friends, church and hobby/interest ares. The cost of moving once you have a family is a often a whole lot higher than easily quantifiable dollar values.
jhull 12y ago
I don't agree with it, but the Bloomberg administration in NYC tried a program where they bought one-way plane tickets for homeless families[1] to leave the overcrowded shelter system. Critics were against it because it wasn't addressing any of the root causes of the problem, rather just moving/hiding it in a similar way to the bulldozing of "the Jungle" I am struggling to find the name of the program in the article in order to see if it has "worked" in any way to reduce homelessness. Not sure if it is even still around. EDIT: It's called Project Reconnect[2] and it is still around even though De Blasio apparently was against it[3] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html [2] http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3601/project-reconnect-homeless-assistance http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3601/project-recon... [3] http://nypost.com/2014/09/06/de-blasio-has-sent-1412-homeless-people-packing/ http://nypost.com/2014/09/06/de-blasio-has-sent-1412-homeles...
mlmonkey 12y ago
> This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move? Exactly. Millions of immigrants uproot themselves and move every year. Yeah, it sucks for the first few years, but then it becomes better. America had its share of mass migrations in the middle part of last century; but for some reason people don't want to move as much these days.
relevantcomment 12y ago
The question I have in all this: can someone name an entry level job in a high tech company that covers the full cost of attending Stanford or even Cal. I went to Santa Clara and graduated 2008. People were excited about getting 70k/year starting out as finance majors. If you plug this salary into a loan calculator and assume ($50k/year for tution and living expenses) that's 200k in debt at graduation. No one in the Silicon Valley makes enough to cover that. The assumption then is that people will have parents who help them out through college. Ergo, there is no real social mobility because you need a certain type of parent to ensure you don't have student debt that leaves you in the red even with a high tech job. The valley and SF just rich kids getting richer while screwing over everyone else.

kaonashi 12y ago

Thanks for illustrating the attitudes that make these kinds of situations possible.

mawburn 12y ago
I've moved plenty in my life, both as a child and as an adult. The most common reason people don't move is because they are afraid to leave the social circles. And what a lot of people don't realize is that their their social circles may not actually be that strong anymore now that they have become adults and had children... which then it just comes down to them being afraid or "just don't want to". Of course there are an infinite number of other factors involved, especially when money is thrown into it, but this has been my experience when talking with people.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago

It costs a lot to move, especially when you are unskilled and have no idea if you will be able to find employment wherever you end up. It is made worse when you are participating in any sort of social safety net because you don't know if you'll have that available when you get wherever the grass is greener. And that says nothing about social and familial networks.

benten10 12y ago
Thank you! I can see how one might feel 'just move' is a good argument, but really NO! In chinatowns all over the country, whenever low-income residents are being priced out, the argument is always 'you can just find another place to stay'. They've lived there for decades, if not more. That's where all the people they know are. They are poor but they do have a support system, that lives with them. When they move away, not only are they economically helpless, but also socially helpless. To tell people to just 'move away' is very dense, IMHO. You might not feel the same way about places you live in, but some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live. Consider the fact that when there's natural disasters/flood/earthquake/radiation leaks, there's not insignificant percentage of people who would rather stay where they are and suffer the consequences rather than move away. Which is why evacuations often have to be FORCED! People would rather die than move away from their homes. You cannot just say 'they can just move away': the concerns are valid.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  > some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live Those feelings are a luxury. Taxpayers should not be forced to bear the cost of someone's emotional attachments. I would prefer tax dollars be spent on relocation assistance + job placement to help get people on a sustainable path.
  - benten10 12y ago
    I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out. In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.

coderzach 12y ago

> My sentiment is not classist or elitist. You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there. Got it. > The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic background. Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s

cjensen 12y ago
I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your property which is risky compared to living somewhere else and having diverse investments and savings. The advice makes sense for the rich as well as the poor.
- chaqke 12y ago
  Financial sense depends on how you price the benefits of living in this area vs other areas. For example, being near family is a a benefit...so is being near people who care about technology, if that matters to you. Consider being a programmer in several startups over 5 years vs being a programmer in a large bank. There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose. I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it. Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.
- bsder 12y ago
  > It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101. This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city--when (not if) you get laid off. Seagate had this problem a couple years ago. They wanted VLSI layout people in Pittsburgh and were offering comparable to Silicon Valley money--and nobody from the tech cities would bite. Why? Everybody knew that they were going to be the most highly paid people in the office and subject to getting axed first. And would then have to move back to Silicon Valley.

codemac 12y ago

Moving is expensive too. If you're hand-to-mouth poor, you cannot afford a rental truck, let alone time off work and still feed your children. You will probably lose your job if you move, and not find another one where you land, especially if you're in the service industry. Good luck with that East bay -> peninsula commute on your minimum wage. The reason many cannot get jobs other places is due to felonies or other legal issues related to being poor. If your children are in school a lot of parents would actually rather struggle than put their family through the trauma of a move, even if in the end it may be better. American society is more mobile than others, but poverty (outside of vagrancy) is extremely restricting. I do think your main thesis is correct (this is unmaintainable, gtfo), but moving is a multi-year struggle of planning and saving at these low levels of income. This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness.

Lawtonfogle 12y ago
Assuming government resources are needed to be spent to help resolve this, would they not be put to better use helping individuals relocate to somewhere sustainable (especially those who would be making a living wage elsewhere) than to subsidize the difference year after year?
- nsnick 12y ago
  Lets not forget that these people would be middle class anywhere else.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Lets not forget that these people would be middle class anywhere else. If they could magically keep their Bay Area income while being anywhere else, they might be. But since they can't actually do that, I'm not sure what relevance that has.
    - 12y ago

Domenic_S 12y ago

I was sitting here trying to figure out how to say basically the same thing. Growing up my dad had a good job but we never were able to afford to live in $NEAREST_METRO_AREA, so we always lived a commute away -- sometimes a long commute away. Charity idea: provide moving & job placement help to get homeless or nearly homeless families into lower cost of living areas. I always have mixed feelings about stories like this. Like the woman from the first video: homeless, just got a garage for her and her 18-month-old. Pregnant again. Kids do not make your financial situation better or life less stressful. The kids didn't ask for poverty and it's not their fault -- all true. But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?

bobmagoo 12y ago
Being a parent I have tons of empathy for how hard life is for single parents. That said, I really lost a lot of sympathy for the woman in the garage though, kids are hugely expensive (about a quarter million dollars to raise them to 18) and I just can't understand how she thought having a second kid would improve her situation. Obviously it could have been an accident or similar, but damn, maybe now isn't the right time for a second kid! I'm probably just a first world asshole with no sense of what it must be like in her position.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  The striking thing to me is that it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Living in a garage while trying to look after an infant is likely to be a big drain on cognitive resources. It's easy for you and me to sit here and say what a bad idea this is - obviously we all enjoy enough economic freedom to sit here chit-chatting about economic policy for a few minutes in the middle of the daytime. When you don't have existential anxieties crowding in on you, such things seem so simple and obvious. It would be a very different calculus if any of us were in that woman's situation. Maybe she made a bad decision. Maybe someone told her she'd be much more likely to get public assistance with two children than one, and she's ashamed to admit it. Maybe she was coerced into sex in exchange for money or because her personal safety was threatened. I very much doubt that she just decided it was a Friday, and a good time to get her sexy on.

jcdavis 12y ago

You mean well, but its easy to forget that moving a family a long distance costs a nontrivial amount of money, even if you do it on the cheap. Maybe not a problem for you or me, but much more so for a family already barely scraping by.

Lawtonfogle 12y ago
Nontrivial, but how does it compare to the 100K a year the article mentioned needed to life them out of poverty? 5K to move and then 20K a year to lift them out of poverty in a different area would allow us to help far more families.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

"I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV" The word optimal is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting here.

xbryanx 12y ago

Are you suggesting they move to Latvia? The country just below us(US) in childhood poverty rates?

larrys 12y ago

"This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move?" The other question is (don't know the answer) how many people who owned homes (instead of renting) were able to cash in in some way on rising property values? My guess is that at least some of the people renting made the decision to not purchase and some of the people owning made the decision to not rent. Of the people who could choose an option. As far as people saying "it costs money to move" what about one family member moving and the other staying until a life is established elsewhere? [1] Maybe what is needed instead of handouts is some kind of social service that makes people aware of their options. Edit: And pushes them to take those options even if they are painful. And also to make them realize that "even though you don't want to move because your friends and family are here" you might have to move if you can't afford this place anymore. Note: I don't live in California and have no skin in this game. [1] And lastly, has the "problem" even been properly quantified? I watch stories similar to this on TV news reports. They always pick the right people that you seem to be able to relate to and a situation that always seems unjust. But they never show exactly how many people actually are like that person (or even not like that person). They pull at your emotional heartstrings because their job is to make the story attractive, not necessarily balanced. And when they do they always add the "to be sure" that gets them off the hook. As in "to be sure not everyone who is homeless is XYZ" etc.

unreal37 12y ago
One of the most shocking things I saw in the Philippines was exactly this. A mother living and working in a city as a nanny/maid, while her husband and children lived "back home" fairly far away. She saw them only a couple of times per year. That's some sacrifice she's making to put food on her family's table!
- larrys 12y ago
  You also find that happens on certain cruise lines. A family works on a ship and send the money back home. I am guessing that some people think that there is so much money sloshing around the Valley that taxes should be higher to take care of those in need. The potential problem there is that you simply encourage more people to stay or actually even more people to move to the area to take advantage of that benefit.

subpixel 12y ago

A big problem with this concept is jobs. The working poor are almost exclusively employed in the service sector at or near minimum wage. Worse yet, many are essentially day laborers, even outside of the sort of fields normally associated with on-demand labor (to wit: startups like workpop.com and shiftgig.com are responding to market realities). Finding a food service or house cleaning or landscaping job in a depressed, but affordable, city like Redding or its ilk is going to be way, way harder than in a more expensive place. Add to this that once you lose your car, you can't live or work outside of a city with functional public transportation. None of those are cities are going to be dirt cheap.

chaqke 12y ago
Agree - and in addition, they may not have a 2-week buffer to find a new job even if it were available. They certainly aren't being flown in for interviews.

onion2k 12y ago

My sentiment is not classist or elitist. The fact you fail to recognise it as elitist doesn't mean it isn't. You are elitist because you fail to understand that life can be a great deal harder for other people. "I did it so they can too" assumes that other people don't live in circumstances that prevent them doing things. That is plain wrong. If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more. One of the things you might have had to sacrifice is having enough money to relocate.

unreal37 12y ago
I admit to not understanding the mindset. So I honestly want to understand it. One family in the article has two parents both with full time jobs. And they're living in a homeless shelter. I understand that they can't afford $3,000 per month rent in the city. But how is it that they don't have enough money to relocate? Even a few miles away to something more affordable? If the father works in construction, that's skill that is in high demand and easily transferable. You can walk into a construction office tomorrow and be swinging a hammer by Monday right? There must be more going on. Some important piece of the puzzle is being withheld from their story.

parfe 12y ago

Getting the poor out of the city won't be easy. They don't have enough capital to fund a relocation on their own. The government will probably need to ship them out on rail cars. Once the undesirables vacate their homes, those structures can be replaced with housing more fitting for the well-off residents of the city.

whybroke 12y ago

The value of your labor relative to housing is dropping every year too you know. The notion of re-balancing forces is a nice simple story but the price of housing relative to income has risen nationwide for decades. There is a similar story for medical care and even food. So yes it's fun to believe in the invisible hand and Adam Smith's 200 year old thesis. But the reality is that the value of all labor is simply being driven downward.

anigbrowl 12y ago
For that matter, Adam Smith was a great deal more aware of structural factors and the lack of sustainability that would result from unrestrained pursuit of wealth -it's salutary that he titled his most famous work 'The Wealth of Nations' rather than 'The Wealth of Corporations.' Smith was keenly aware of the dangers of mercantilism and WoN is anything but an argument for unrestrained capitalism. Indeed, the second most observation in the book, after the one about the fact that butchers and bakers are motivated by self-interest rather than generosity, is that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

cyberpanther 12y ago

So if you look at the numbers actually tons of people are moving out of California. On the other hand tons of people are moving in too. However, I think the overall effect is Cailifornia is losing people every month.

pron 12y ago

Disregarding the question of the cost/possibility of moving, do we as a society want communities to be completely segregated based on income? Do we want poor kids to grow up without role models and good education opportunities? Do we want rich kids to grow up believing they somehow deserve all this, completely detached from the rest of society and the problems they face? The forces of the market are not the forces of nature, and we make the rules (or, at least, shape them greatly).

nsnick 12y ago
This is called social engineering.
- pron 12y ago
  It actually has an older, more common, name: policy. Doing something and not doing something are both kinds of policy, and are both choices we make. Pretending that the market forces are somehow neutral or natural is factually false. They are nothing more than the product of a certain chosen policy.

amagumori 12y ago

> I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically. > I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year are you serious, dude? leave the advice giving for people who have actually been poor and understand the logistic difficulties of poverty. "just move"? you have the freedom to move to the most economically optimal place for you, and you think THAT is equivalent to the situation of a family living hand to mouth in transitional housing or section 8? YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

ccvannorman 12y ago

"Just Move?" I'd rather live out of my car (and have done so..briefly.) Together with my cofounders over two years we have built an amazing company and product (and we still have a ways to go). This would not be possible outside of Silicon Valley, and our trajectory would look much different (worse) if we lived in, say, Montana.

mc32 12y ago

This is a multi-faceted issue that has no easy fix. In the SF bay region the issue is exacerbated by convoluted politics perpetrated by residents and government. Locals steadfastedly oppose growth, even when most might agree it's for everyone's good. On the other hand, some sub areas are bound geographically and can't expand horizontally, so the only way is upwards, which faces even more resistance. On top of this, no one has a natural right to live in a specific area. At the same time society has a responsibility to provide reasonably affordable living space for lower income residents. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the posh areas of town. Still as land prices increase, is it even possible to build in areas of high land prices? Where does that money come from? Do we divert taxes to that effort rather than building that same housing in areas where that money would go further? With regard to people not being able to move away due to cost, there are lots of people who move to the US with nothing but a few dollars and an address. It's possible. I guess the question is do we want to put our own citizens in this kind of predicament?

adolfojp 12y ago

Our society can't operate without an integrated workforce and you can't have an integrated workforce if you segregate people based on their income. For every software engineer in the Bay Area there is an army of waiters, cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, retail workers, office workers, school teachers, nurses, and unskilled laborers that supports him. And if you move them all out, well, I don't think that I have to explain the consequences of that action.

somebodyother 12y ago
The Bay Area engineer is likely there to work for a company that obsoletes one or two of those unskilled laborers. I think the really scary part will be 10 years from now when everything's automated

r00fus 12y ago

Your sentiment is naive. People build up support structures - extended family, close friends, church and hobby/interest ares. The cost of moving once you have a family is a often a whole lot higher than easily quantifiable dollar values.

jhull 12y ago

I don't agree with it, but the Bloomberg administration in NYC tried a program where they bought one-way plane tickets for homeless families[1] to leave the overcrowded shelter system. Critics were against it because it wasn't addressing any of the root causes of the problem, rather just moving/hiding it in a similar way to the bulldozing of "the Jungle" I am struggling to find the name of the program in the article in order to see if it has "worked" in any way to reduce homelessness. Not sure if it is even still around. EDIT: It's called Project Reconnect[2] and it is still around even though De Blasio apparently was against it[3] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html [2] http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3601/project-reconnect-homeless-assistance http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3601/project-recon... [3] http://nypost.com/2014/09/06/de-blasio-has-sent-1412-homeless-people-packing/ http://nypost.com/2014/09/06/de-blasio-has-sent-1412-homeles...

mlmonkey 12y ago

> This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move? Exactly. Millions of immigrants uproot themselves and move every year. Yeah, it sucks for the first few years, but then it becomes better. America had its share of mass migrations in the middle part of last century; but for some reason people don't want to move as much these days.

relevantcomment 12y ago

The question I have in all this: can someone name an entry level job in a high tech company that covers the full cost of attending Stanford or even Cal. I went to Santa Clara and graduated 2008. People were excited about getting 70k/year starting out as finance majors. If you plug this salary into a loan calculator and assume ($50k/year for tution and living expenses) that's 200k in debt at graduation. No one in the Silicon Valley makes enough to cover that. The assumption then is that people will have parents who help them out through college. Ergo, there is no real social mobility because you need a certain type of parent to ensure you don't have student debt that leaves you in the red even with a high tech job. The valley and SF just rich kids getting richer while screwing over everyone else.