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Comment by mullen | Hacker News Reader

High Speed Rail helps fix this issue. You can live an hour out of the city, where housing prices are much lower and the schools can be much better and then commute via HSR to the city. Unfortunately, there are too many short term voters and residents in California to see the vision of high speed public transportation to solve many of the housing ills that plague this state.

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In addition to the long timeframe, HSR is also mostly not a commuter solution even in places like Japan. And commuter rail is already a thing in many places and widely used (including the Bay Area). I live about 40 miles west of Boston and I can get into the city by rail today in about 90 minutes.

And in other news nobody can afford to live in Fitchburg anymore.

I can't say I've really looked at housing prices in the area for a long time, but my sense is that they've been relatively stable. Trulia says the median price for sales in Fitchburg is something like $180K. (I expect some of the surrounding more rural communities like mine are higher.)

It's one big difference between Boston/Cambridge and some other places like the Bay Area. You can get away from some of tthe really high real estate prices relatively quickly and a lot of the tech jobs aren't even in the city anyway.

I was being facetious though I fully expect Fithburg to turn into Cambridge within my lifetime.

There's not much to be gained by living in Fitchburg. The real benefit is that a commute from somewhere rural to a train station in Fitchburg (or the "end of the line" for some other city train system) is painless.

I sort of thought you might be :-) No, for me, the reason to live out here is to be more or less rural (certainly exurb). It would be barely tenable as a daily compute into Boston (though I did a sometimes commute for a year) but works for the 495-belt companies.

I guess it's just a function of overall population but it's nonetheless interesting that while Boston/Cambridge have indeed gotten very expensive, there's a lot of pretty reasonably-priced housing not all that far out.

I don't know. I work with someone who recently sold their house in Leominster (next to Fitchburg for those not from the area). He said there had been very little appreciation over a long timeline.

ADDED: The problem when these old small New England manufacturing cities gentrify is that you end up with a dozen square blocks of upscale and the rest is like it's been for decades. I worked in downtown Nashua for a long time and it was like that. Which, for me, makes it get boring quickly.

Even if all the municipalities suddenly jumped on board, even in the best case high-speed rail is a decade and a half off. It isn't a realistic solution.

SF to Gilroy could be done in under a decade, which then would be connected to LA once that track was done.

California is messing up the HSR project by not getting SF to Gilroy and LA to San Diego completed first. Sacramento to Nowhere is a PR blunder for the state.

It's because that's the only places where they can actually build. The peninsula is full of millionaires that hate the idea of HSR. ("But I don't it at grade!" "But I don't want it in the air!" "But I don't want it in a trench!" "But I don't in a tunnel!" "It's all moving so fast!" "Can we put an HSR to stop every 2 miles?")

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/10/14/palo-alto-bla...

http://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/high-speed-rail-met...

The BART extension to San Jose was first voter approved in 2000. Many years and bonds later it's closer but a San Jose BART station still does not exist.

I'm not sure CA could do SF to Oakland by HSR in a decade.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extensio...

It is not a realistic short-term solution, but maybe a good long term move? Your comment makes it sound like it isn't a reasonable investment at all because it won't return in the desired timeframe.

The only reason it could not be realistic is that California is politically dysfunctional and unable to solve problems. Nearly every other industrialized country has a rail system that connects cities and helps commuters. It is totally possible to accomplish.

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