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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

We need a mindset change. Jobs that can be done remotely, should be done remotely. Making people commute to office buildings to fill cubicles is crazy.

They should be able to live where they want and not waste 2 hours a day burning fossil fuel.

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While I agree, it's a huge culture shift. I fought traffic to work at a few places in LA where much of the work could have been remote. At both places we had a remote office, but coordination was terrible. Some people did work remotely, but many times coordination was worse than remote teams. Part of it was culture and part of it was that there weren't tools to facilitate remote collaborative work; one side didn't have phones at their desk, there were 2 or 3 sanctioned chat apps, poor tools for remote meetings (and nothing for small, ad hoc meetings). When I brought up the friction between locations, they focused on the tools to copy data back and forth--ignoring the communication issues.

I don't have all that much experience with remote work, but I'd prefer a company that started around remote work instead of being a remote worker at an established company.

It seems though that most people want to live where rents are already the highest (which is why rents are high!). The nurse quoted in the article who drives 2 hours to reach SF wants to work closer to her hospital in the city. That job in particular is hard to do remotely.

From a practical standpoint, it seems like a large percentage of people in the Bay Area would prefer to live in the City or very near it. Yet, this is a physical impossibility. The ways to allocate scarce resources comes down to two methods: let the market decide or let government decide. Either way, folks will be left out.

if the market were to decide, there would be more, denser housing.

If there were no zoning regulations, you are absolutely right...and this would've resolved itself long ago. But there are strong zoning and property rights at play. I'm very libertarian, and was priced out of the Bay Area (recently left grad school for Texas), but I'm actually sympathetic to the homeowners there who are using democratic means (i.e. their elected city reps) to support their interests. Society (in the form of the state government) could upend the property rights they are leveraging...but that would have significant incentive repercussions down the line. It would greatly weaken property rights...which is a foundation of Western society. There are far deeper, and interesting, issues aside from mere housing stock.

Zoning is the exact opposite of property rights. It restricts what you're allowed to do.

It's both/and, not either/or. It gives me the right to not have to live next to an oil refinery, at the price of prohibiting my next-door-neighbors from putting an oil refinery on their place.

what about the people using democratic means to strip homeowners of the "right" to prevent development? It sounds like your ideology is pretty scattershot. Aren't libertarianism and democracy fundamentally opposed ideologies anyway?

> It seems though that most people want to live where rents are already the highest (which is why rents are high!).

Personally, I believe that is an artifact of zoning laws + commute distance.

Most people I know rationally choose housing based on commute distance for an individual/couple + price.

> Most people I know rationally choose housing based on commute distance for an individual/couple + price.

I suspect that the people you know are not representative of the whole population; there's plenty of evidence people consider factors other than price and commute-to-work distance in setting preference of where to live.

> Jobs that can be done remotely, should be done remotely

There are a whole lot of jobs that don't really fit into that. Programmer-sphere is pretty unique there. And not all programmers (certainly a minority) map well to remote work.

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