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.
San Francisco is surrounded by cities which are not San Francisco. Manhattan is part of New York City, and is surrounded by more of New York City.
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
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.
in less than 1.5 hours you can be in Zurich from Konstanz without a transfer (if you insist on 7am sharp then it's one transfer taking less than five minutes). Just in case you want to live in a nice university city and not a little village. And it's way, way cheaper than Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
New York is also surrounded by New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester, etc., etc., etc., and people commute into the city with reasonable travel times.
i live in europe and dunno anyone who would be commuting more than 90-100km daily which is like 1hr by train, although most of the people are lazy to do even that even with decent public transport, so 80mi is very extreme example for europe
I feel that it's misleading to say that the problems are self-inflicted. People who work in SFBA or rent there are suffering from the housing and infrastructure problems that are (to certain extent) caused by residents and homeowners in SFBA - these are two different populations with only a partial overlap, so the problems aren't self-inflicted, they're inflicted by one group onto the other.
Been doing that for a couple of years. Works well. No need to switch the train between Waldshut/Koblenz and Zurich.
Allows me 2h of coding each day during the train ride.
> The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
I never claimed them to be stupid. Your words, not mine.
But the Stanford professor writing about the plight of the poor workers commuting for 2 hours lives in a multi-million dollar home in Atherton and votes for anti-poor-people zoning laws.
The young, billionaire, startup CEO who wants to cause a positive impact in the world lives in Los Altos Hills, where zoning laws forbid lot sizes smaller than 1 acre, and bans multi-family housing or more than one dwelling per lot.
And the progressive tech worker who advocates for low-income-housing and makes $250k per year lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Mission paying half of the market rates.
The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
But the thing is that you (Bay Area landowners) are not really bearing the cost of insufficient housing. In fact, you're benefiting through increasing home values (for which you are not taxed due to Prop. 13). It's renters and others like Ms. James who are being hurt. The particularly cruel aspect of this is that once these people have been forced to the edges of the Bay Area, they no longer get to participate in the future decisions that will either exacerbate or alleviate this problem. Ms. James no longer gets to vote in Alameda, and thus has no say in the decisions that keep housing costs high and her commute long.
That's why I believe housing policy needs to be decided at the Bay Area or CA state level. When these decisions are made at the local level, it's people like your friends who selfishly vote to inflict the high costs of housing on to others. Hopefully this NIMBY-ism can be averted by making sure that all stakeholders get a say in the housing policy of a incredibly interconnected region.
>It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here...
This statement smells really, really bad.
As the article stated, she had to leave the SFBA because she was evicted and the housing prices had gone up too much. She lived there, and didn't chose that. As with all gentrification, the population that lived there didn't chose for affluent (typically white) people to move in and raise their rents forcing them further and further away from what had been a home to them for generations.
Politics in the US are controlled by the rich, so the idea that "the people" are choosing to deal with the consequences of this housing crisis is absurd.
What's happening is that the wealthy are externalizing all the suffering caused by their voracious rent-seeking onto those beneath them, including middle class developers who think their interests align with them (they don't).
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.
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.
Soon? When has a major infrastructure project that hasn't even broken ground ever realistically promised to deliver for any reasonable value of soon? And Hyperloop is far from even being proven feasible, much less breaking ground.
It's basically impossible to get a job in Zurich though. In San Fransisco, a coding bootcamp grad can get 140K out the door. This is how capitalism works. We take the bad with the good. Politics reflect the will of the people and the people in San Fransisco on both sides of the aisle want to make as much money as they can, any way they can.
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.
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.
That's not the full story. Commercial property is much more profitable for a city than housing, so every city in the peninsula is trying to build office space, and trying to offload the cost of actually housing those new workers onto other cities. The tax code needs to be fixed to realign incentives. One proposal I heard was to make it so that the state shares the income tax of the employees that live in the city with the city. That might disincentivize low income housing, though.
Keep going up the chain of causality. Property Owners are so NIMBY because there's an economic incentive to behave that way. This is only the case because Prop 13 caps their property taxes. If California had property taxes that, like other states, could increase as the assessed value of your home increases, the incentive to oppose new building would be significantly lessened and it would then be in everyone's best interest to keep housing costs low, not just those who rent or are looking to buy.
Prop 13 is immoral and has not only wreaked havoc on real estate market in the state but has also gutted the state's public education system. It needs to be repealed before any progress on these housing issues can be made. There can be provisions to ensure that people don't lose their homes to rising property taxes...Texas, IIRC, has one that allows property taxes to accrue and only need to be paid when the title of the property changes hands, which seems like a good compromise. But the state's population is going to go up which means we're going to need to build a lot more housing, and our laws need to create an environment where that can happen.
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.
A very similar thing is happening here in Los Angeles. Luckily, the Mayor and city officials are fighting back to push through more multi-family housing. It's still going to take a while before housing prices stabilize though.
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").
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But note that the vast bulk of that is an imputed value of his time which, unless you're turning down work you can't do because you're in a car commuting, isn't something you can pay the bank with.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
Hm.[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Sankt+M%C3%A4rgen,+Germany/Z...
There are plenty of small towns along the Rhine or near the Bodensee that are commutable to Zurich.
People commute to Geneva from France too.
53 minutes from Singen, DE, to Zurich.
You can buy a 1-2 BR apartment in Singen for <200k euros:
http://en.immostreet.com/germany/singen-457417
in less than 1.5 hours you can be in Zurich from Konstanz without a transfer (if you insist on 7am sharp then it's one transfer taking less than five minutes). Just in case you want to live in a nice university city and not a little village. And it's way, way cheaper than Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
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That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
But the Stanford professor writing about the plight of the poor workers commuting for 2 hours lives in a multi-million dollar home in Atherton and votes for anti-poor-people zoning laws.
The young, billionaire, startup CEO who wants to cause a positive impact in the world lives in Los Altos Hills, where zoning laws forbid lot sizes smaller than 1 acre, and bans multi-family housing or more than one dwelling per lot.
And the progressive tech worker who advocates for low-income-housing and makes $250k per year lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Mission paying half of the market rates.
The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
That's why I believe housing policy needs to be decided at the Bay Area or CA state level. When these decisions are made at the local level, it's people like your friends who selfishly vote to inflict the high costs of housing on to others. Hopefully this NIMBY-ism can be averted by making sure that all stakeholders get a say in the housing policy of a incredibly interconnected region.
Pretty sure you're not speaking for me and most of my SFBA friends...
This statement smells really, really bad.
As the article stated, she had to leave the SFBA because she was evicted and the housing prices had gone up too much. She lived there, and didn't chose that. As with all gentrification, the population that lived there didn't chose for affluent (typically white) people to move in and raise their rents forcing them further and further away from what had been a home to them for generations.
From the outside it looks like you've created the worst of both worlds.
What's happening is that the wealthy are externalizing all the suffering caused by their voracious rent-seeking onto those beneath them, including middle class developers who think their interests align with them (they don't).
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/
Furthermore, a Hyperloop might get you from city to city, but then local transit is needed for those last couple miles.
The stations have to go somewhere, the tunnels have to go somewhere, etc.
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I really hope that's not true
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.
Prop 13 is immoral and has not only wreaked havoc on real estate market in the state but has also gutted the state's public education system. It needs to be repealed before any progress on these housing issues can be made. There can be provisions to ensure that people don't lose their homes to rising property taxes...Texas, IIRC, has one that allows property taxes to accrue and only need to be paid when the title of the property changes hands, which seems like a good compromise. But the state's population is going to go up which means we're going to need to build a lot more housing, and our laws need to create an environment where that can happen.
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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").
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
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.
> 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.
Bay area has a whole bucket of specific problems - but there are general shared trends that extend to other cities with big tech industries.
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.
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.
What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
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.
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?
Don't they do this already with property and state income taxes?
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.
...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.
https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...
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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.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
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.
> So each mile you live from work steals $795 per year from you in commuting costs.
> $795 per year will pay the interest on $15,900 of house borrowed at a 5% interest rate.
[0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
http://www.metro-report.com/news/single-view/view/beijing-ma...
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-08/15/content_306...
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.
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.